Hour by hour, minute by minute, U.S. clocks are ticking towards a March 11 deadline that demands I.T. professionals apply special patches to avoid a headache that some have likened to the Y2K scare.
In a government attempt to conserve more energy  , Daylight Saving Time (DST) will go into effect three weeks ahead of the typical springtime change, starting March 11, 2007.
As the deadline fast approaches, there is concern that the change may confuse computer programs set to automatically handle DST hours, and every computer system is subject to its impacts. On the mild side, minor aggravations such as scheduling and calendar errors could occur. On the dramatic side, there is a risk that organizations that don't patch their networks properly could see mission-critical applications fail.
Older Systems Most at Risk
While users of the most current generations of operating systems, such as Windows Vista, XP, 2003, or Mac OS X, can rest assured that the DST transition will be relatively smooth, Microsoft has not publicly released a patch for earlier systems such as Windows 2000, which still has a fairly large installed base.
What's more, UNIX and Linux server environments may have been left unpatched for years. Some industry watchers are comparing the dilemma to the Y2K panic because no one really knows what will happen on March 11 -- or on the last Sunday in October when the time changes back again -- if the patches aren't deployed and retained.
"Y2K was the last time that many of these legacy servers had to be updated," said Chris Andrew, vice president of Security Technologies for PatchLink. "While there may not be a huge number of such systems in an organization, they are most likely running many critical business processes, and thus need to be updated with the latest patches."
The Database Dangers of Waiting
Though DST is still a few weeks away, industry experts warn not to wait until the last minute to begin assessing networks. I.T. administrators could find an unpleasant surprise if the software patch doesn't work. If companies begin the process now, DST updates could be part of a regular and routine maintenance rather than a pre-midnight scramble.
One of the most critical DST dangers impacts databases. Databases are dependent on timestamps to manage revision tracking and rollbacks. Servers and their clients must remain in sync to maintain coordination and integrity. User authentication is also time dependent. Timestamps are encoded into validation packets to assure that an intruder is not capturing and reusing authentication keys for nefarious purposes at a later time. (continued...)
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