Jake Anderson <[email protected]> writes:
> Jim Donovan wrote:
>> I noticed the following on the Commonwealth netbank site this morning:
>>
>>> NetBank, Mobile Banking and Telephone Banking will be unavailable between
>>> 2am and 5am EST on Sunday 4 April 2010 to allow for the changeover from
>>> Australian Eastern Daylight Savings time to Australian Eastern Standard
>>> time. Please take this timeframe into consideration when completing your
>>> banking. For updates during this change, please visit:
>>> www.commbank.com.au/update. Please press NEXT to access NetBank.
>>
>> Assuming it wasn't an April Fool joke, perhaps it means their databases use
>> local time and the logic won't permit transactions to be entered out of
>> order such as might appear to be if one happened just before the changeover
>> time and another less than an hour later.
>>
>> How quaint! I remember hearing once that Commonwealth Bank servers were
>> always rebooted on Sundays so they'd be less likely to go down during the
>> week.
>
> Odds are its more to do with their internal applications which are probably
> written on cobalt running on CP/M machines or something equally modern.
> Your probably lucky they even know time zones exist ;->.
My money would be on the very boring option, paranoia:
If you shut down as many of these systems as possible during the change over,
then those systems *can't* go wrong — because they are doing nothing.
If you leave them running then, hey, maybe something breaks.
So, if you want to look at the cost/benefit analysis the cost of a few hours
outage overnight is pretty low, especially if you can schedule it well in
advance, and even more so if you can do some other maintenance work at the
same time.
Meanwhile, no risk of things going wrong during the change-over, which is
always a huge PR fiasco even if nothing really bad happens.
Daniel
If it was my call, I would probably do the same thing. Way too many
developers get simple things like "this day has no 2:30AM" or "this day has
two 2:00AMs" wrong.
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✣ Daniel Pittman ✉ [email protected] ☎ +61 401 155 707
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