[rescue] Sun announces DST patch availablity...

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: "Jonathan C. Patschke" <jp at celestrion.net>
>Date: 2007/01/29 Mon PM 05:26:07 CST
>To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [rescue] Sun announces DST patch availablity...

>On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
>
>>> I'm very tempted to roll my own patches for 2.5.1, 2.6, and 2.7 and
>>> release them as freeware.  $400 per server is way past unreasonable.
>>
>> I thought that all you had to do was download the zone file, compile
>> it and create a symlink to the correct place.
>
>As far as I know, yes; hence $400 (per systems!) being unreasonable.

But, if you read into it a bit, Sun is offering a special upgrade to Solaris 10 once the tab exceeds $35K...

>> Or is it just that sysadmins these days can't follow a 5 step
>> procedure?
>
>Unless the procedure invovles a happy dialog box with candy-coated icons
>and a button that either says [ Next > ] or [ Finish ], you'd be sadly
>surprised at how true that is.

Well, they probably wrote a very general Java-based tool, so they can handle any number of daylight savings time adjustments, then they had to package it up, craft a custom installer, devise a central server to manage the time zone changes across an arbitrarly large server farm, ensure that works on all platforms supported by all three OS environments (2.5.1, 2.6 and 7). Oh, and of course mark up the price so that they still make a profit while their most valuable customers can have a significant discount (50% off! ;^)

Lionel