Saturday, February 17, 2007

America faces self-inflicted doom of Y2K! Run away! Run away!

The US it seems is facing another IT headache around the corner with it's own self-create Y2K type bug. Apparently, back in 2005, Congress voted to extend daylight saving time by four weeks, and it kicks in this year. According to ZDNet this is likely to result in lots of people having diaries and calendars knackered for a month and there is speculation that it could impact on banking systems.

Now, just for a reality check, this is not end of the world type stuff at all. Any big bank/company will - unless they're complete idiots - be using NTP to time-sync all their systems. So long as the NTP server is right (and patched for the change) it won't cause problems at all. Microsoft have also already issued update patches.

If professional businesses are not rolling patches out then it's their own fault.

1 comment:

Mostly Ordinary said...

I'm doing a piece of work for a number of US finance houses where are ina bit of panic about the DST issues - mainly because they are worried their partners using extranet real time applications won't have taken it into account.

Let’s be honest how many large organisations actually stay up to date on anything but security patches. You would have thought they would have learnt by now.