[NCLUG] Daylight Saving Time, and free unices

[mike loseke]

On 3/4/07, Bob Proulx <bob at proulx.com> wrote:
>
> Chad Perrin wrote:
> > This year, rather than the first of April as you might have expected,
> > DST in North America starts on 11 March.  Some OSes are handling this
> > well, with automatic patches available through their respective software
> > management systems.  Others, not so well.
>
> Anyone else who maintains their system with current security and
> other critical patches will already have gotten the updated timezone
> files long ago.  This is really a non-issue.  I personally don't find
> it worth discussing.
>
> However what I would find a more interesting question is for anyone
> who believes that they are maintaining a system that is not updated
> and for some reason can't be upgraded to say why they are in that
> position.  Why can't they upgrade?  What is the issue?  That would be
> a much more interesting discussion.


I help maintain some unix systems in a production environment that are older
than some of the members of this list. A few of these systems don't have any
timezone capability at all. Luckily, the translated time isn't tied to
anything critical, like databases or build processes, so we can get away
with manually adjusting the time on them. As the manufacturers - if they
still exist - no longer support both the OS and the hardware, we're pretty
much left to our own devices to resolve the issue. Simple enough to do, just
a point to share as an example of some systems that can't be updated and in
some cases would cause damage if they were tampered with too much.