Daylight Savings Time Zone Changes

By Brian Richman, EIS Technical Services Team

Who says this is just a case of sleeping an extra hour in the fall? Beware. The saying “Spring forward and Fall back” will not have exactly the same meaning from now on!

“Huh?” and “Its news to me” are the kind of responses I get from most people when I tell them about all this. In fact, that’s exactly the same response I got over a decade ago when I started to tell people about the possible problems that the Year 2000 (Y2K) “bug” could bring too. Not that the DST time zone changes are in anything the same league as the Y2K problems were, but just the same, it’s a potential problem for UNT and we have to deal with it.

So what is this time zone change exactly?

Starting in the spring of 2007, the daylight saving time (DST) start and end dates for the United States will change to comply with the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This means that the dates when DST changes in the United States will start three weeks earlier (2:00 A.M. on the second Sunday in March) and will end one week later (2:00 A.M. on the first Sunday in November).

While almost everyone accepts the DST time zone changes, the original idea is attributed to Benjamin Franklin (in his 1784 essay, "My Economical Project"). The idea was first advocated seriously by a London, England builder Mr. William Willett in the pamphlet, "The Waste of Daylight" (1907). It was adopted during the First World War and has been in use on and off so to speak, in the USA since 1918.

Complications

The impact of this on the EIS systems in use at UNT is not quite as simple as a change to exactly when in the year us humans ‘spring forward and fall back’, as the UNT Enterprise Information System (EIS), has to be made to accommodate these changes properly. We need to remember, accessing EIS from the World Wide Web means exactly that. It is world-wide in scope and that people anywhere in the world can access EIS and see information about UNT. As some of this information is dated material (and will be potentially time sensitive in nature) this has the potential to be an important matter and so we should get it right.

It’s further complicated by our having a large number of servers (over 150 in fact) that make up the EIS system, some with databases as well as a varied collection of software packages that have to work together and date and time issues are deeply integrated into them all. Luckily for us, the manufacturers of the computer systems and the software vendors we use are working on or even already making patches and updates available to accommodate the change in “spring forward and fall back” dates.

So far (as of the first week of January 2007), the effect on EIS is limited to the need to ensure that all the servers have the correct revisions of patches applied to them. As not all of our vendors release patches at the same time, this is something of an ongoing activity.

The technical services team is busy investigating what needs to be changed from the operating system perspective of these servers as are the other CITC teams that look after the other aspects of the EIS system. We currently have several servers in test with patches applied to them and if no problems are observed we will roll-out these patches to all the other EIS servers in the few weeks. As with Y2K we have a finite amount of time before the new and earlier time change happens and are taking appropriate steps to ensure our servers should handle the date change correctly at the right time on the right day.

This kind of activity underlines the complex and interrelated nature of our systems here at UNT. We need to keep a broad as possible view of things such as these and remain as flexible as we can when these changes creep up on or are imposed on us. Who says this is just a case of sleeping an extra hour in the fall?

Return to top