Surviving the Daylight Saving Time Switch
Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the United States begins three weeks earlier this year, on Sunday, March 11. This has some people worrying about
Y2K-like side-effects, in which any time-dependent technology that can go wrong will go wrong -- from Outlook calendars being off by an hour to entire flight schedules being disrupted.
Of course, countries have shifted their daylight savings time dates before without major technical outages.
So how seriously should a nonprofit IT manager take the impending change? TechSoup is gathering information and links to help nonprofits decide what actions to take. If you have a story or advice to share, we encourage you to
edit this page and add it.
Information about the change
DST start and end dates
prior to 2007:
- Starts at 2:00 A.M. on 04/02/06 (first Sunday in April)
- Ends at 2:00 A.M. on 10/29/06 (last Sunday in October)
DST start and end dates
beginning in 2007:
- Starts at 2:00 A.M. on 03/11/07 (second Sunday in March)
- Ends at 2:00 A.M. on 11/04/07 (first Sunday in November)
Specific technologies that could be affected
Special thanks to TechSoup Community member
gdarter for getting us started with the following information. (The
original discussion thread can be viewed in the TechSoup forums.)
Older *nix operating systems, like Unix and Linux
- Software with schedulers, like Enterprize schedulers and backup schedulers.
- Middleware interface software like MQ Series and BizTalk.
- Monitoring data collection software for capacity planning data collection.
Web-Specific Technologies
Macromedia/Adobe ColdFusion Application Server
Apache
PHP
Perl
Python
Ruby
MySQL
PostgreSQL
Articles, blog posts, and other DST information