T Minus 6
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The countdown is nearing the end. It's 6 days to the new daylight savings time change, coming early this year and you need to patch your systems this week if you haven't already. Unlike Y2K, this has been a somewhat quieter issue in the press, but it's still going to affect every system out there.
Microsoft has been providing patches for modern systems, but not older systems. Or so I thought.
It appears you can get patches for older software, it just costs more. Or less, depending on how you look at it. Last year Microsoft was charging $40,000 per product for patches. That was for the products like Windows 2000, Exchange 2000, etc. that were in the extended support phase of their lifecycle.
Now you can get those patches for $4000. Note that it's that price per company, regardless of how many machines you have. If you have really old software, NT 4, Exchange 5.5, etc., then you're on your own. You'll need to manually fix those machines. Since a bunch of voicemail, security, and other embedded systems were built on NT 4.0, be sure you check those and think about migrating them.
Or setting an Outlook reminder on every administrators's system.
This shouldn't be a big deal, more of a pain for admins that have to manually change old systems. However it's a great chance for Microsoft to build some loyalty from smaller companies. Offer those companies with < 100 employees the Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000 patches for free. Or maybe a nominal $1000. It would certainly make things easier on the people that help sell and stick with your systems: the system administrators.
SQL Server 2005 Maintenance Plans
There's one other note I got sent by a few people last week concerning SP2 and SQL Server 2005. In response to requests, maintenance plans can now be installed without SSIS and they can use hours to run the cleanup tasks. That's in addition to days, weeks, months, and years and we're happy to have that option back, especially for people with frequent log backups.
However the test plan wasn't so good. Existing maintenance plans are now interpreted incorrectly, meaning if you specified days, you now clean up in hours. If you specified weeks, it's days, etc. If you're any kind of programmer, you can guess how "inserting" a lower value might have broken things, but you'd think that as long as this service pack was being tested that they'd have caught it.
I checked my server with the CTP release and it was a problem there, but I'd never noticed it. I checked the hours setting on new packages, but hadn't checked existing ones. It certainly seems to have slipped by lots of people, not just Microsoft.
I guess a lot of us need to update our test plans.
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On older MS systems, why spend so much money? Write a batch file and schedule it with Task Scheduler...
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally) -
Jeff,
I'm not sure and it appears there are unofficial patches or you can hack the registry. Maybe it's so you have support.
Wouldn't you need 4 schedules? One to move the time on each of the new dates and one to correct each of the existing time changes from the old dates? Also, couldn't you just patch an NTP server on your network and have other servers synch with that one?
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Yep... you're either correct on needing 4 or you'd need to turn off the auto-daylight savings time. And the auto-synch you mentioned would certainly be the way to go. Cost's a lot less than 4 grand never mind 40...
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally) -
Just an opinion.
Syncing will not work because the time that is sent by the time servers is not an absolute time, it is a referance time. If you have a machine in California synced to the NIST time servers in Maryland, do you think it gets the same times as a server in Maryland? No, because the time data sent out by time servers is a referance time and it is up to the indivual OS to make time zone and DST changes to be displayed. I beleive the referance time is UTC.
We are going to experience this issue at work due to using an old version of Java, so we can not patch windows, or the Java time and Windows time will be out of sync. The solution, on March 11th 2:01am, using a batch file jump the time to 3:01am. On April 1st at 3:01am(after OS has auto adjusted) using a batch file rollback the time to 2:01 and delete itself (actually task scheduler will delete).
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Here is a free utility that will handle the DST time zone updates for windows machines running XP, NT, 2000, 2003, Vista. It updates Daylight Saving Time in these time zones:
-Alaska Standard Time Zone
-Central Standard Time Zone
-Eastern Standard Time Zone
-Mountain Standard Time Zone
-Pacific Standard Time Zone
-Atlantic Standard Time Zone (Canada)
-Newfoundland Standard Time Zone (Canada)
http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2007/01/unofficial-windows-2000-daylight.html
Sample command for silent install from command line:
DaylightSavingFix.exe /qinstall
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"SQL Server 2005 Maintenance Plans SP2 issue"
This is already fixed by MS. The client and server both should hav the latest version of SQL 2005 SP2 for this issue to be correctly resolved.
If you downloaded SQL Server 2005 SP2 before March 5, 2007 please read article 933508 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base regarding an important issue with SP2.
The file to watch out is Microsoft.SqlServer.MaintenancePlanTasks.dll
Check the KB article 933508 for more details
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Well... hats off to MS... ALL of our servers had the MS patch and all switched time correctly at the appointed time. Even my home machine updated correctly and on time.
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)
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