Gavin’s Digital Diner

[Here's my follow up message on the DST change from around Valentine's Day (and nobody sent me flowers, even!)]

[Note: Because of system troubles, this was also posted on my old Typepad Blog – so if you're experiencing a vague sense of déjà vu… this would be the reason]

 Dear friends:

It was a couple of weeks ago.  You might remember I dropped a note here and there about the impending DST changes – that’s Daylight Saving Time.  Just wanted to bring you up to speed on what’s what, what’s where, and what’s happened.  As you probably know, this year marks the beginning of a new schedule for changing to and from DST.  We change earlier (March 11 instead of April 2),and we change later (November 4 instead of Oct 31).  No big deal, right?   Not so.  Here are my real-world tales.

Background:

With the change in when DST starts and stops, computers and things with calendars need to be told to change how they calculate what time it is, depending on where you are.  Items affected include: OS’s and NOS’s, applications like Outlook and Exchange, and devices like Blackberry’s, and probably Palms, and Windows Mobile, but I don’t have any, so I don’t know.

What’s up with the OS’s and NOS’s, and the like?

1. Microsoft released their OS patch for XP/Server2003/Server2000 last Tuesday.  I believe it went from “optional” to “critical”.  So, if you use automatic windows update, you may have gotten it already.  If you have gotten it, and you HAVEN’T yet updated Exchange/Outlook (assuming you’re running those things), well, your calendar is screwed up.
   
2. Patches for Outlook and Exchange have been available for a few weeks.
   

Our Experiences:

1. We had prepared.  We pushed the OS update to all users via WSUS, and did the servers manually.  We’re still working to finish up our remote offices.
   
2. We used the IntelliAdmin GUI version to patch a couple of Win2000 servers, and we used the impending change as an excuse to upgrade one Exchange server from 2000 to 2003.  (2000 is out of life cycle and there is no official patch – rumor has it you can get one for a couple of thousand $$, and if you’re on 5.5… well, the rumors say $80,000. But, hey, those are rumors.)
   
3. We were ready to go with the patches for Exchange – it’s apparently a two-step process. And there is a patch for outlook if you use it without Exchange. We had that just in case. [It's my understanding that if you fix Exchange, you don't' have to fix it via Outlook, and visa versa. They're looking at the same message database – unless you have calendars in non-Exchange locations (like PSTs). ]
   
4. We also had scheduled a PM recall for all laptops – so we could make sure that they got the patch and that local copies of Outlook were appropriately “fixed” by the general Exchange patch, and so we could add some other stuff – it’s that time of the year. We do a PM every 6 months.  It’s just like a bath; take one every six months, whether you need it or not.  
   
5. Finally, we were advised that our Blackberry’s would also need some sort of update or patch.  We decided to tackle that separately.
   

In hindsight, we should have been more tightly coordinated.  Here’s what happened:

We pushed out the OS patches yesterday.  Immediately, unless you were running Outlook 2007 (like me), all the appointments between March 11 and April 2 were off by one hour.  Not only that, all the “All Day” appointments now stretched across two days, starting at 1:00 am and ending at 1:00 am the next day.   Since we push updates via WSUS, we had to wait for the process to finish – and, don’t you know, in the meantime, we had users already notice the date problems.  The phone began to ring.

Not to worry, we then (hurriedly) started the process to roll out the Exchange patch.  I use the word “patch” loosely… It’s more like a set of scripts that goes through each mailbox, one by one, and adjust things by one hour for those dates.   Let me warn you now, this is not a “click and wait” patch.  It’s not that straight forward, and demands futzing with .INI files, and this and that. Had my main engineer scratching his head for a couple of hours just to set it up.

The results:

Most updates to exchange worked. But some didn’t.  Haven’t a clue why.   Apparently though, according to the log files, Exchange stores multiple time zones for some people. There are OWA Time zones as well as regular time zones, and others that I haven’t figured out.  Some folks – mostly based overseas, or maybe it’s the ones with Blackberry’s – generated errors.  We’re having to go to each of those users accounts, and run the client patch manually. 

Then, the patch also munged up folks’ “favorite folders” – it ate the listings willy-nilly; ate them for some, not for others. So the helpdesk spend the morning answer calls about “where did my shared calendars go”… Luckily they were all there, just missing the listing, and hence missing from the nice “check box” listing.

Finally, the Exchange patch munged up BESSY, the Blackberry Enterprise server.  This is a strange one – apparently one part of the Exchange patch is a CDO update.  Blackberry Enterprise Server uses CDO.  Running the patch on the exchange servers changed permissions on CDO so that some users could no longer SEND messages from there BBs.  Which users, you might ask, any user with Domain Admin privileges.  Namely, Me and my staff.  D’oh.  Grumble.  The only solution we found there was to remove any BB users from the Domain Admin group. That did it. Apparently MS does not like letting Domain Admins have the “Send As” privilege required by the BBerry’s to work. It’s a security thing.

Finally: The blackberry updates are easy – Trust RIM to do it right.  Just a link and a download.  Point your BB Browser at: http://www.blackberry.com/dst2007  And follow the instructions, painless.

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