A couple weeks back, Ron Cameron was telling me that he really believed that the Daylight Savings Time (DST) issue would end up being worse than the year 2000 (Y2K) problem. He told me the thought it would be at its worse when the time used to change (first of April), rather than in early March, when a lot of folks simply just changed times manually. I smiled and went along as it seemed like a reasonable prediction, but from what I've seen, I think he may have been spot on. I really hope he's wrong because so far it has been a real pain in the rear and if it gets worse, there's going to be some serious productivity loss and IT downtime getting it all sorted out.
I'm just going to spend a couple minutes talking about the things I've been exposed to so far. First, it was the Microsoft patch that was supposed to fix the problem on Windows 2003 Servers. Because we had to update servers around here, we figured it was a great time to go ahead catch up on hot fixes for the last couple months. So on we went running Windows Update, and WHAM things started breaking and the worst part was we didn't know exactly what was breaking things because we had applied multiple patches.
The first thing we had happened was on our software activation server, where a security patch decided to disable Basic Authentication and enable Windows Authentication without asking, of course this caused a stoppage to the nice people trying to activate our software. Upon some research Microsoft claimed they did it because Basic Authentication should only be used over SSL, but guess what, that sever is using SSL. Like we'd really pass our keys around without encryption. It was hard to find the problem, but at least it was an easy fix.
Second, was one of our development domains. For some crazy reason the DST patch broke one of the COM+ services on the domain controller, causing the server to quit functioning properly and putting a halt to some stress testing we had been performing. I don't know the details here, as I wasn't hands on, but the only resolution we found was to rebuild the machine. What a pain!
Next thing was all my appointments getting messed up on my Windows Mobile device. The device changed its time correctly on the new DST, so you would have figured things would have worked. But some type of confusion between this and the patch to fix Exchange had confused everything. Not a big deal, as I realized quickly (along with everyone else) what had happened and our administrator had already sent a patch over so it wasn't too bad at all, except showing up and hour late to my first couple meetings.
Finally, Darrin Bishop started telling me about a completely bizarre SharePoint 2007 issue he'd run across. Check out it out on Darrin's Workbench.
I really do enjoy the extra daylight, but I'm really starting to dread the first weekend in April.
Chris
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