Why in the hell did congress decide that it was essential to the survival of the country to change DST?!?!?!

From an IT standpoint.. what a bloody nightmare. I manage a number of servers, ranging to Windows 2k, 2003, FreeBSD, and Linux. All of which require a different update for the DST changes. What a pain. I should have dealt with these back in March, but such things happen when you’ve only got 2 admins to manage over 100 servers….

So, for those interested here’s what ive come across:

Windows 2000: Microsoft has a utility called “tzedit” which will allow you to manually update the DST info. I dont know for certain, but i think they later released a Windows update to automate this.

Windows 2003: Same as 2000, except that the Update was released earlier than the update for 2000 was, so the need for “tzedit” is removed, unless you tried to update it before the update was released.

FreeBSD: Apparently the guys at FreeBSD shipped 6.2 with the new DST info pre-packaged. Lucky for me, the newest FreeBSD server i manage is 6.1! With the majority being older. So if you’re in the same boat, use Ports to update the zone info. First Update the ports tree, then install /usr/ports/misc/zoneinfo. Afterward I ran tzsetup to make the changes take effect, I dont know that this is necessary.

Linux: We run Fedora, and CentOS, so the yum package repository of choice. yum update tzdata gets the update, then system-config-time re-set’s the clock.

Hope this helps someone avoid my headache…