Production systems beware: U.S. Daylight Savings Time comes at a new time this year

Hello All,

it was recently brought to my attention that last year the U.S. altered
the dates when Daylight Savings Time starts and ends. Many if not most
computers presume the old change dates and therefore, if left to change
automatically, will change at the wrong times. This will be vital for
people in the database community who manage applications that need
accurate timestamps.

You can read up on this issue here, among other places:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/31/AR2007013102318.html?referrer=emailarticle

I've never investigated how NTP servers handle DST changes - that is,
whether they switch with the fabrication that we have more daylight hours
or leave it to clients. Hmmm... Anybody know? It'd be nice to know that
we can trust our NTP servers to tell our systems what time it is and
therefore ignore this issue for those systems that are NTP clients.

Regards,
Richard

--
Richard Troy, Chief Scientist
Science Tools Corporation
510-924-1363 or 202-747-1263
rtroy(at)ScienceTools(dot)com, http://ScienceTools.com/