Backups and Daylight Savings Time

On another backup list I monitor, there was an instance of someone whohad their system change time on October 28th. Two issues came out ofthis. One is that they may have failed to patch their system for the2007 statutory changes in daylight savings time (it should change onNov. 4th for many). Two is that they had a backup job scheduled for2:05am that Sunday. It launched at 2:05, and then 2:05 rolled aroundagain an hour later, whereupon it launched again, waited for the firstto complete and then repeated the whole backup.

So, I thought I would pass this along to the Amanda users list just incase it is a useful memory nudge for anyone.

Daylight Savings time laws changed affective Spring 2007 in the U.S. andAustralia. I don't know what the situation is for other countries. Therewere patches to be applied according to your operating system. I appliedSolaris 9 patches. Mac OS X and Windows systems got theirs by automaticupdates. One of our labs had an older Sun OS 5.6 system for which therewere no patches. After messing with it for a while, they finally puntedand said it didn't really matter.

If you have a server that was not patched this year, and you are in ajurisdiction where it matters, now is the time to check into it. It willbite you twice a year until you patch it.

On the second item, my backups start at 12:45am, so no problem. However,I'm going to be checking all my crontabs to make sure I don't haveanything between 2 and 3am that might be affected. In the Spring theymight be skipped, and in the Fall they might be run twice.


My apologies to those who find this too obvious. ;-)


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Chris Hoogendyk

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  O__  ---- Systems Administrator
 c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
(*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center

~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst

<hoogendyk AT bio.umass DOT edu>

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