On New Zealand DST changes: congratulations Telecom, Microsoft... Sorry Apple users
I read a lot of misinformed opinion about DST changes, which is something that affected New Zealand (with extra weeks of DST), Australia and soon the U.S.
To prevent having to apply patches to their PC, even some technical people thought that they could just disable the automatic clock update on their server OS and manually change the time during the extra weeks, turning the feature back on when the old DST time kicked in.
The problem is that that same people use Exchange and Outlook to manage their appointments, and even though there's no "international" appointments not many people realise how things are stored.
Appointments (and many other data) are stored with time in the GMT timezone. This way it's easy to show the correct time if and when the user moves from one timezone to another. The problem is that if we have DST rules in our PCs that do not conform with the real life rules in place then appointments will show one hour later or earlier during those extra DST weeks. Worst if we have updated machines interacting with non-updated machines.
The problem goes even further if you create appointments during those extra weeks, but falling outside DST. All those appointments will be shifted one hour when the DST ends, and havoc is upon us.
Now, this is only one example. What about international travel where people crosses many timezones? And if you create meetings in other timezones?
Microsoft New Zealand did a great job of creating patches for their Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows Server OS platforms, plus for Exchhange Server, Microsoft Outlook and Windows Mobile.
Not only Microsoft issued a patch for all those platforms, but this patch was sent with the monthly automatic update a couple of months ago, so your mom and pop won't have their PCs running on the wrong time, neither the big corporate will have problems.
Telecom New Zealand even sent out a SMS to all of their Windows Mobile users informing people to visit a website to apply the patch. Vodafone New Zealand did not go that far, but sent out a press release asking people to check with their manufacturers.Sun sent out information and an updated Java Runtime, as well other platforms had the same.
What computer company was missed? Apple Inc did not issue a patch for this. Were they too busy with the Apple iPod Touch, or simply deemed the New Zealand market too small to need an update? I understand there's a third party patch for this, but users will have to manually find it and apply the correction - which is not ideal. It should have been an automatic update.
I hope they do release an update for the U.S. market though.
UPDATE: Rod is not happy with his RIM Blackberry and Vodafone New Zealand either.
UPDATE: for users interested in the Microsoft patches, follow this link to the Microsoft NZ Timezone page.
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Comment by sbiddle, on 30-SEP-2007 15:19
The fact a minister would pass a law change for a DST change that would take place in the same year really shows out how of touch MP's are when it comes to the real world. I'd love Rick Barker to come out and tell us why it was essential we had a chance this year instead of next year and what official advice he received as to the implications on IT systems as a result of the change.
We have Windows XP Embedded systems at work that appear to have failed to update even after having a registry patch applied.
Comment by rscole86, on 30-SEP-2007 15:37
We have had the same problem here running 2000 pro machines.
The slaves in the building did not change the time, only the master.
Comment by GB, on 30-SEP-2007 16:21
Mauricio
I absolutely agree that releasing patches at all is better than Apple's not at all, but only 1 month before? They've known for months.
Sure, Windows 2000 is end of life but I think it's really exorbitant charging that amount. Perhaps it's my socialist ideals coming out.....
The patch you installed was probably just for your Exchange server, and yes that is a simple, install and reboot. The convoluted process I referred to updates all calendar appointments in the information store for every mailbox. If it's just one or two users, the one program can be run under each users account when they are logged on which will update their calendar. But in an enterprise environment, this is not logistically possible, hence the series of programs and copying and pasting files to achieve this.
My tongue in cheek was obviously not sufficient when I mentioned Vodafone. I think it is appalling to give just one week's notice. And by snail mail too. You're absolutely right, anyone who hadn't thought of updating BES by then would be rushing around like a headless chook planning the deployment in an enterprise environment.
Comment by wiselark, on 30-SEP-2007 19:40
There's a free Windows 2000 DST patch including NZ DST available here:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/Downloads.htm
What I want to know is how I can ever patch my iPAQ 2210 that runs PocketPC 2003 and up to today met all my PDA and calendaring needs :(
Comment by alex, on 30-SEP-2007 19:58
Windows 2000 isn't really such a big problem. Sure, it's not supported by the KB933360 patch, but Microsoft have provided instructions to update Windows 2000 using TZedit.exe or registry modification.
http://www.microsoft.com/nz/msdn/timezone/manual.mspx
So maybe you have 500 machines to update?
Step 1: Update one Windows 2000 pc according to instructions in link above.
Step 2: Testing the modified machine.
Step 3: Export the registry key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\New Zealand Standard Time]
Save to file. e.g. NZDT.reg
Step 4: Distribute NZDT.reg to the other Windows 2000 machines and update them in the same way that you'd distribute any other update to 500 machines.
Microsoft did o.k. given the time available... not great, not bad... but certainly o.k. So did most of the Linux distributions, HP-UX updates were made available... Java updates too.
The worst performance here would appear to be the lack of Mac OS X patch. Does Mac OS X use timezone data based on the public domain tzdata source?
I'm talking about the one you get here:
ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/
The New Zealand updates were provided in tzdata2007f which was available in June (might even have been May) 2007.
The tzdata2007f source was the basis of the Linux and Java updates. FreeBSD uses the tzdata source too. Isn't OS X BSD based?
Seems like Apple is sending a message to OS X users... "don't use OS X for any serious business use". I like OS X in many ways, but Apple are shooting themselves in the foot here.
Comment by Juha, on 1-OCT-2007 09:35
Well, I got the Telecom SMS (two of them) as well, with a URL to Microsoft's site. So I go there to get a patch, but... the page doesn't display properly on the Apache.
I get some text, then a bunch of HTML encoded %%% stuff. Can't take a screenshot unfortunately.
Looks like it'll display fine on all MS browsers apart from Pocket IE.
However, going to the site with my laptop, I see that...
"Note: The download for Windows Mobile 2003 does not contain Daylight Saving Time changes for New Zealand and Western Australia. It is for DST changes in the United States, Canada, and Mexico only."
That kind of sucks for Harrier etc users.
Comment by Ian Wilson, on 1-OCT-2007 10:12
Well would you belive it....
Got to the office this morning with the view to see if the 2000 sbs serve had updated it's time, but nope....
Any way, my vista ultimate machine had downloaded the dst patch, looking good I thought.
But would you belive it, it is sitting 1 hour ahead of everyone else in the office, looks like I'm off home early tonight :-)
Also got a problem with the outlook 2007 patch, it just keeps failing on the update to the calendar.
Comment by Bill, on 1-OCT-2007 11:45
For those PalmOS users out there, Palm didn't release a patch (and probably won't bother). There is a manual workaround though:
Under Prefs ... Date & Time
Select Wellington (or Auckland if you have to) from the Location dropdown and then Edit List… at the bottom.
Scroll down the list and select Wellington again, and click Edit.
Make sure that “This location observes Daylight Saving Time” is selected and change the Start and End dates to match the following rules:
Start: Last Sunday of September
End: First Sunday of April
Hope this helps. Bill
Comment by Solo, on 2-OCT-2007 10:11
I must say that I am not too impressed with the way Microsoft handles the DST patches.
The server hotfixes works well through WSUS server, which is great. The windows 2000 server is not a huge problem after the reg file has been applied. The biggest problem for us, however, is the Outlook calendar events. We patched our Exchange server, ran the rebasing tool (both from client and the server), and the appointments are still off by one hour! When we respond to meeting requests from external organisation, the clock will be off by one hour! When the users trying to sync their phone with Windows Mobile OS on it, their system clock will be off by one hour! We have escalated these issues to Microsoft support (where they charge $350 for a case) and they couldn't work out why this is happening (yet).
Hopefully by April next year they can work it out.
Comment by ykiwi, on 5-OCT-2007 00:57
this was so not an issue for my mac.
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Comment by GB, on 30-SEP-2007 13:36
I'm afraid the reality of how "helpful" Microsoft have been is being grossly overstated.
To begin with, despite having known about this for many months, Microsoft only released the main Operating System patch at the end of August, then slowly trickled patches for other affected products. The main patch, KB933360 is indeed a simple patch home PC's can install and in theory, voi-la. I use Linux.
The bigger issue however has been updates for Exchange. The "patches" involve a convoluted process on installing several programs on a client PC, copying several files resulting from running the one program into a folder, then running a CLI-based batch file which spits out these bizarre and frankly, unnecessary messages (Google "0x80004005 dst" and you'll see what I mean) finally resulting in a folder with several log files some if which do make sense and others don't. Even then, there's no absolute way to be certain that all this has been truly successful. Until tomorrow when I expect to have customers calling me complaining.
Is this really the best the biggest software company in the world could come up with?????
Vodafone, bless them, the week before Daylight Savings was due to come into effect, sent letters to our customers who have a Blackberry Enterprise Server, advising them BES needs to be updated and they should take all steps necessary to do so and contact their IT providers.
Fortunately we already formulated a plan to deal with BES servers, as RIM had already provided instructions on their site. That being said, a critical part of the process didn't work for any of our customers with BES but thankfully Vodafone were able to advise us that despite RIM stating the script for updating SQL was not to be changed in anyway whatsoever, a change did need to be made to resolve this. That was Thursday.
And did I mention Microsoft apparently would charge customers with Windows 2000, US$4000 for the patch as the OS is no longer supported?
So for me and my colleagues it's been a very annoying month of late nights, early mornings and weekends, getting our customers patched in time. Patches which only tomorrow we will find out if truly worked.