[geeks] DST change costs

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 @ 01:26 -0600, Doug McLaren said:

> Either way, I'll bet the overall costs of this change ARE 
> substantial.

It ain't Y2K 2.0, but its going to require lot of work in some shops. 

If I were billing some client for the time it took me to track down,
understand, and apply the required configuration changes to one IRIX server
and one Solaris server, ye olde cliente would be out a couple of hundred
bucks.  In the IRIX case, the OS version (6.5.22) is patchable, but you have
to have a support contract to get the patches.  I don't know about the
Solaris machine; it's still on Solaris 7, and hasn't been patched at all.
Thus it was easier to just modify the configuration file.

There are other machines here, of course, but fixing them will just be a
case of copying the setup from one of the servers. Still, it's probably
another hour's work, maybe two.

However, some place like my former employer, who has dozens and dozens of
UNIX boxes, spread over many different OSes, will be having a ton'o'fun with
this stuff.  Of course, they didn't even run NTP before I got there, so
maybe they don't care.

-Shel