I have to agree with Daniel. shutting them down is the safe option. Having a service unavailable through the wee hours is far preferable then say having to undo a whole of transactions that inadvertantly get run twice (think of all the automated payment systems scheduled to run at certain times). A bank even has to consider the connections to other financial institutions and whether their applications behave properly.
Also you could almost guarantee that while the core transaction processing is on a old-fashioned mainfram, the will more than likely have one of pretty much every platform doing some part of their business applications. ( I actually worked on a project that was going to bring in a new Java on UNIX platform a few years ago, unfortunately it was put on ice 6 months in). Regards, Martin [email protected] On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 3:39 PM, Daniel Pittman <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > -- > ✣ Daniel Pittman ✉ [email protected] ☎ +61 401 155 > 707 > ♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons > -- > SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ > Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html > -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
