Acceleration Software for Business-Critical Applications

Daylight Saving Time 2007
Best Practices – Remediation using RTO Discover®

October, 2007

The Issue

Based on the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the Federal government has mandated changes in the implementation of Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the United States. For 2007, this has resulted in changes in both the “Spring forward” and “Fall back” dates. As a result, the time will revert to “standard” time on November 4, 2007. However, the prior reversion date was October 28! Unpatched, or incorrectly patched and configured systems MAY revert on October 28, causing unknown, and almost certainly, expensive business impact.

Factors to consider beyond Daylight Saving Time changes made earlier:

Methodology

1) Know what you have…

RTO Discover allows system administrators to discover, inventory, and audit their entire system infrastructure to quickly and easily identify which machines have received patches, which version of the patch was applied, and to seek out systems with DST problems that haven’t been updated and need DST fixes. You can use the RTO Discover tool to analyze your current state of readiness for the upcoming time change. RTO Discover provides a rapid, effective means of building a full profile of your system and application infrastructure in order to make effective decisions.

2) Based on your business priorities….what infrastructure is affected?

By checking with your vendors and using RTO Discover to quickly survey what’s currently deployed, you can quickly determine which components of your business delivery systems are not compliant and may cause problems.

3) What order must issues be addressed?

It’s important to determine what dependencies are assumed or embedded in your infrastructure and applications. Dependencies such as a patched Microsoft Exchange server or Java runtime should be understood before patching an application suite. Check with your software vendors for guidance on priority order.

For example, Microsoft recommends the following order for Windows environments:

Server Operating Systems

Desktop Operating Systems ( Vista is exempt)

Updating the Exchange Calendar

Updating Outlook clients

Updating the Exchange Server (Exchange Server 2007 is exempt)

Updating applications……

4) Obtain appropriate fixes from appropriate resources.

Microsoft outlines required patches for all of its products at:
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_prodlist

Vendor Information

BEA Systems:
http://support.bea.com//support_news/Patch_for_2007_Daylight_Savings_Time_Changes.jsp

Hewlett-Packard:
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/dst.html

IBM:
http://www.ibm.com/support/alerts/daylightsavingstimealert.html

Linux:
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/tzdata

Lotus Notes:
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21245334

Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst

PeopleSoft:
http://peoplesoftexperts.blogspot.com/2006/10/impact-of-us-daylight-saving-time.html

Sun – General
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hubs/dst/

SUN – Java Runtime Environment (JRE):
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/USDST/


5) Implement remediation, with unit-level audits.

RTO Discover provides pre-defined component level queries for Discover. These queries provide reports on what version/release/patch levels are deployed (DST component Summary) for installed Microsoft software that is affected by DST. Queries are also provided for auditing installation of Windows DST patches as designated by Microsoft for those same products (DST component Unpatched).

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Sample Query Result

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Sample Query Report

6) Perform complete audits even after final remediation is complete.

Any re-provisioning with a non-compliant image after remediation will cause problems!

7) Repeat steps 1-6 as often as necessary to ensure on-going compliance and performance.

RTO Discover provides a quick, easy, no impact tool for auditing configuration and deployment changes to your IT infrastructure!