So we finally moved into the new DST without major hiccups. I heard that some of the computers and servers failed to obey the patch, but that's it. The major issue I guess was calendar client, specifically MS Exchange and Outlook. We have a user whose appointments were off the schedule by a full three hours after the switch to the new DST today. It seemed hard to digest that the DST change (which affects the clocks just by 1 hour) would cause a shift of three hours. On further investigation and asking around I found out that this was not the only case. There were reports of similar incidents and this presumably affects only the traveling users whose time zones change quite frequently.

Microsoft had kindly provided a tool to update the mailboxes at the Exchange Servers which required minimal user intervention. In our environment, we had opted to update the non-recurring appointments at the server level and leaving the update of non-recurring appointments to the end users. I know it sounds strange as the tzmove.exe tool provided by Microsoft to update Outlook client does not differentiate between single and recurring meetings and it ends up as redundant work. That's the way managers work. Incidentally, this particular user who is a heavy traveler was in the west coast at the time of patching and his timezone was registered as PST during the patching. Whereas in reality he is a east coast user. Most probably that is what caused that issue. And I had to update the Exchange server again to update only his mailbox with his timezone changed to Eastern time.

I don't know whether that fixed his issue or not, but I haven't heard anything back from him yet. As they say, no news is good news.

On the other hand, I use Linux FC6 on my office laptop (as an experiment of course) and on my home web server that is hosting this site. I did not even get time to run any updates on them and I suddenly thought of it on Sunday after the change had happened. I don't even login to the web server. When I checked my server I was so glad to see that it had correctly identified the time zone change and it had the new DST setting built into the OS. Of course Windows Vista and Office 2007 both have the new DST settings so I didn't have to do anything to my Vista machine. But then that raises the question, why was this not taken care in an earlier patch? Why there is always the last minute rush which makes lives of IT support as miserable as it can get.