This came from another mailing list I monitor. In short: you need to patch for the DST changes, no matter what.
----- Forwarded message from Lamont Granquist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- Myth #1: if your system has /etc/localtime set to GMT you don't need to patch. Myth #2: DST is fixed once the patches are deployed. As an example of how both of these are wrong, consider the following: The architecture is simply a set of webservers in front of a sybase (ick) database. All the servers are set to GMT. The webserver stores a schedule of future dates in the sybase database. It has functions sybase_to_localtime() and localtime_to_sybase() which convert display PST times and store them in the sybase database. Since there were dates and times for 3/11 - 4/1 which were entered into the database when the timezone files on the webservers were broken, the epoch time stored in the database was off. If the scheduler is then run off of epoch time the schedule would have been executed an hour off (if the scheduler ran off the display PST time and the scheduler was unpatched everything would have worked, even though the data was wrong, although the hour when the shift happened might have been a little funky). Patching the webservers will result in the incorrect epoch time being displayed correctly at the incorrect PST time -- so the bug becomes apparent when the webservers are patched. So, the moral is that even if your servers are all 'set to GMT' you still need to patch them, and you want to get it done well before midnight on Saturday because you may not be finished yet after the patches are in place. (Apologies to anyone who thinks I'm pointing out the obvious, but I've been explaining this a lot lately) ----- End forwarded message ----- -john -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
