Well, as Gideon says, Y2Kv7 has come and gone. ANd it was not without pain. From Solaris boxes that needed a lib-c and kernel patch, to firewalls that did not like a manual work around. it has been an interesting 2 weeks. 2 weeks to the day I returned.
Cisco was the easiest. Just a one line configuration change, and voila! 200+ routers and a bunch of switches were patched. Ditto NetApp boxes (running a modified Unix core). Microsoft? Well, if you were XP or 2K3, welcome to the patch heaven! If you were running something like 2k (or god forbid NT4 - as there was zip, nada, zilch and zero on it), there was a registry hack. Ok, that is fine, we can do that.
So we patched all the systems. And at 2am 3/11/07, the 2K3 servers flipped over, the Netapp and Cisco boxes did as well. The 2K boxes? Nada! Did not change. A run to TZEdit showed the right settings, but you cant fool 2K! No way! They were not budging! We finally figured it out (took about 1/2 hour). Here is the critical line from Microsoft.
| j. |
Select the new time zone you created, and then click Apply. |
Ok, so you see that, open the control panel, click on time zones, and it has the correct one. No new one there. It was and always was Eastern (-5 UTC). So you are done, right?
WRONG! You have to RESELECT IT. Even tho it was always right! And not just click and select, but double click on it so you can get an Apply button!
So instead of being an hour and back to sleep, it was up all night with coast to coast (an adventure in itself) as I went to each 2k server and double clicked and applied. Thanks for nothing Microsoft!
Oh, and that Solaris firewall? Kept syncing all servers to the wrong time. It does not like being manually set. SO it was manually set back. I would like to manually set it to something, and time is not on my mind.