So how was your DST?

With all the fuss about Daylight Saving Time a couple of weeks, there seems to have been very little said about the affects or problems that people had after the event.

I had several issues with out of date clients not being patched, the main ones being Windows XP service Pack1 clients that are not supported by Microsoft anymore and therefore not receiving non security patches via Windows Update. Instead we ran the daylightsavingsfix program from IntelliAdmin with a batch routine to run on affected desktops. Another desktop issue was caused by people somehow unchecking the observe Daylight Savings checkbox within Windows so their time was still an hour out!
The other issue that I had was with Kronos releasing patches right up to (and beyond) the DST timezone change but the instructions were not complete and it didn’t even update the timeclock machines out in the field so they were one hour out too.

Thankfully, the DST period is over…or is it? Next weekend, is when the original time change would have taken place – do you have any plans in place to check that machines do not change their time again?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 6:50 am and is filed under Andy Helsby, IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

http://www.technewsradio.com Steve Holden

We ended up manually making the change across most of the devices on the network that didn’t have an easy fix, and then we will roll back when the ‘real’ DST occurs. And we plan to do the same in the Fall in reverse order. – Steve
http://www.technewsradio.com Steve Holden

We ended up manually making the change across most of the devices on the network that didn’t have an easy fix, and then we will roll back when the ‘real’ DST occurs. And we plan to do the same in the Fall in reverse order. – Steve
http://www.mikemcbrideonline.com/blogger.html Mike McBride

We didn’t have too many major issues with PC’s, a few folks had Outlook appointments at the wrong times, but a lot of that was traced to someone planning the meeting and sending out invites before they had been patched, and even though we specifically told people to print their calendars before we pushed out the patch, so if things “slid” it’d be obvious, well not everyone felt the need to pay attention to that. The real issue we are still dealing with are blackberries. We had a bunch that didn’t complete the patch installation when you pushed it out wirelessly, most of which we were able to correct by going to the blackberry site and using their USB tool, but we have a handful of older models that use serial connectors, that didn’t complete the download of the patch wirelessly, and can’t connect with USB. We have no idea what to do with those!
http://www.mikemcbrideonline.com/blogger.html Mike McBride

We didn’t have too many major issues with PC’s, a few folks had Outlook appointments at the wrong times, but a lot of that was traced to someone planning the meeting and sending out invites before they had been patched, and even though we specifically told people to print their calendars before we pushed out the patch, so if things “slid” it’d be obvious, well not everyone felt the need to pay attention to that. The real issue we are still dealing with are blackberries. We had a bunch that didn’t complete the patch installation when you pushed it out wirelessly, most of which we were able to correct by going to the blackberry site and using their USB tool, but we have a handful of older models that use serial connectors, that didn’t complete the download of the patch wirelessly, and can’t connect with USB. We have no idea what to do with those!
Martin

Same here. Our biggest pain was with Outlook Calendaring and the effects it had on Blackberry calendars. For the most part it was ok but we had some appointments which refused to change. Of course they had to be the Managing Directors appointments…

The tools Microsoft provided were pretty lame, to be honest. The features were pretty poor, and even the look and feel made it seem like they threw the apps together at the last minute. I must say that Blackberry impressed me with the level of documentation and support they provided. Their patches were a little clunky to install, but their documentation even covered Microsoft’s process, and the prerequisites needed (e.g. the SendAs permissions patch).

Our plan for next weekend is basically, be on guard! I am pretty confident there wont be anything alarmingly unexpected. The main areas of concern are our accounting applications which run on Sun boxes.
Martin

Same here. Our biggest pain was with Outlook Calendaring and the effects it had on Blackberry calendars. For the most part it was ok but we had some appointments which refused to change. Of course they had to be the Managing Directors appointments…

The tools Microsoft provided were pretty lame, to be honest. The features were pretty poor, and even the look and feel made it seem like they threw the apps together at the last minute. I must say that Blackberry impressed me with the level of documentation and support they provided. Their patches were a little clunky to install, but their documentation even covered Microsoft’s process, and the prerequisites needed (e.g. the SendAs permissions patch).

Our plan for next weekend is basically, be on guard! I am pretty confident there wont be anything alarmingly unexpected. The main areas of concern are our accounting applications which run on Sun boxes.