Remember the technology scare for Y2K?  A similar problem faces ITS now because of the changes made to Daylight Savings Time (DST).  DST now starts the second Sunday in March and returns to CST the first Sunday in November; this year those dates are March 11 and November 4.

 

No big deal you say.  For ITS, it means every software and hardware system relying on time stamps must now be checked, evaluated and tested---and patched with software updates.   Of course, this is a minor problem compared to Y2K; however, significant problems may occur from applications performing their processing at the incorrect time.

 

Complicating the effort is that not all vendors have said whether and how their software might be affected.  Novell has released a patch for the network, today Siemens released a patch for the telephones. Microsoft has released a patch but did not make it a critical patch; so if you have automatic update it won't include the time patch.  And those are just a few of the over 50 systems that must be investigated.  For example, will the alarm system from ADT work with this change; will the student ID card access system work,  will GroupWise calendering system work?  And some of the older systems that we use are no longer supported by the vendor---what happens then?

 

This will also affects you at home.  Do you have systems that automatically change the time? What about your VCR, DVD, cell phone, clocks, calendering system on your computer and/or cell phone, time on your computer and/or cell phone?  Can you even patch them?

 

ITS will keep you updated on the problems encountered with NCC systems.

 

This year has been plagued with system problems.  We want 2006 back!  Anyway, at 12:48 am on Monday Web mail tanked.  It was back up at 7 am; it was the same problem as before and  we have Novell working on a solution.   Then on Tuesday morning ITS saw that one of the main servers was going to crash so we decided to be pro-active.  By doing so the system ended up taking longer to recover.  What is that saying that no good deed goes unpunished?  Then on Wednesday  the CMS system dropped out of existence.  We had to call to our vendor to help us restore that system.  And so it goes!