Here comes the summer

At least if you leave in the southern hemisphere, like me.

And, with summer, comes the daylight savings time. Which, for anyone involved with a large server farm, means that a multitude of clocks will have to skip one hour at a given point in time. For those of you blessed with living in a country where DST comes at a predictable moment, this is relatively easy: if your timezone is set correctly, the servers will do it for you by themselves, and all you have to worry about is whether you have any cron jobs that will be skipped but need to be ran anyway (with the reverse problem coming a few months later, of course).

This is not the case for me.

DST here starts at midnight on a (apparently) randomly selected Sunday in October, and ends on a randomly selected Sunday in February. The actual date is selected a few weeks in advance; this year, it will start on Oct. 19th and end on Feb. 15th. But what this means is that you (and by “you” I mean “we”) have just a few weeks to make sure that all your servers are going to switch gracefully to the new time at the right moment (this is very important for several applications, and less so for several others).

In our case, this means a long list of servers having their timezone files replaced and being rebooted in the middle of the night (a reboot being the safer way to guarantee that all processes will see the timezone change, when you have redundant servers for all services), a few servers a day, quickly enough so that all will be ok when the date comes. Of course, our timezone files already include an educated guess about the next time change (we’re betting on Oct. 17th, 2004 and Feb. 13th, 2005), but we don’t have a good track record on this…

All this is, actually, a convoluted way of asking: when will government realize that all aspects of a country need some stability, not just the economy? Jeez, can’t you just pick a date in advance for the next decade? Or at least until the next election, since the next president will probably want to change everything again.

Sorry, I just had to vent.