[geeks] DST hell

[Mike Hebel]

On Mar 10, 2007, at 1:48 AM, Bryan Fullerton wrote:

> On 3/9/07, Dan Duncan <danduncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I got a good laugh out of it.  When it was handed down from above in
>> our meeting that we WOULD be installing DST patches despite the fact
>> our 1000+ production systems operate in GMT, I warned them that the
>> patches may introduce new bugs.  We've spent months rolling the
>> patches out to production systems.
>
> Ah, we're less worried about that the server operation and more
> worried about our apps correctly converting dates passed by clients.

It occurred to me yesterday that all these expensive patches on the 
'nix boxes that don't run GMT could all be boiled down to a cron script 
that's run twice a year that checks a simple text datefile for the DST 
start/end and compares that against the local date then sets the time.

if $date = $dststart then set time -1.00hr < dststartdate.txt

(Yes I know that script won't work but you get the idea.)

Then have the desktop systems sync their time to one of those servers.  
Am I I missing something here?  Why is this so hard?  You could even 
add it to the login scripts.

Hell, you might even be able to do something useful with a Windows 
server:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216734

;-)
Mike Hebel
----
I was dreaming Rem. Everything was so horribly dry, there on that 
planet, even people's hearts. As I watched the people who lived there 
from far away, I kept wondering why they went on living, how they kept 
on living. Rem, listen to me Rem. I did a bad thing. I did a bad thing. 
Tell me? What should I do? - Vash