If you missed it and your system did not change as per schedule for DST on Sunday morning, how do you handle it, especially for the PeopleSoft systems?

You can change the system time manually and apply the patches to make sure for next. Before you change time, you need to take care of certain things:

1. Ensure that all the process schedulers are stopped and started after changing the time.
2. This is more critical for shops which have Global presence as different processes might have been scheduled at different time zones.
3. If you have a sequence of processes that are to be run at the time you are going to change the system time and before you start the process scheduler, you put them on hold before you change system time. Example you have noticed that your system did not change on Sunday by one hour and you noticed it on Monday morning and you want to change your system time at 9:30 AM on Monday morning [March 10th ] and expected to bring all the process schedulers down and change system time and bring back the process schedulers in an hour, then check you have any sequence of jobs/processes scheduled between 9.30 AM and 11.30 AM that should run on a specific sequence and will not be problem if they are kicked off all at the same time.
4. Why? When you reset the system time and restated the process schedulers all jobs which were scheduled after 9.30 AM till 11.30 AM will get kicked off at the same time, by which some of them might error out. To avoid that you kick them off manually as they are on hold and ensure they run in the proper order they are scheduled to run.
    

I provide here the commands for RHEL as most of the systems that I manage are Linux OS, only a few are in other OS like AIX, Solaris & HP. You can always find the substitute commands for other OS systems.

It is only if you are managing servers/PS Applications which are located in DST Time Zones like US, Canada, Europe or you have users present in any of the DST Time zones. You might be working in India or China and manage US/ Canadian or any other DST Servers or PeopleSoft Applications, then it is applicable to you also, if you have not taken care of it already.

To check if your system is up to date for this DST change, run the command below. It should work for most user ids, but in some boxes it might require root access depending on the installation:
 
#zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007

If this gives an output with the date “Mar 11” then you can relax that you have the latest patch to take care of the actual DST change in 2008. But still check to ensure that the DST changed happened on Sunday morning after you get up.

If it does not provide the expected result for the zdump command, you need to install the patch. Before installing you can check the latest version that has been installed already in the system by running the following queries depending on your systems’ service contract available like,

#up2date -u tzdata

or if you do not have service contract for RHEL, you might as well try

#rpm –q tzdata

and you might get something like this:

tzdata-2007d-1.el4

Depending on your system, apply the patch in test systems and then in production systems next after manually changing the date for this time.

Comments (3)

	1. 03-09-2008 08:29
	I have setup NTP sync. Should I have to install the patch still? My server did not change time last night Guest

BryanR

	2. 03-11-2008 18:18
	Yes, still you should have the patch installed. NTP servers send time in utc and your server converts this to your local time with its time zone. That is why you need the patch. http://psadmin.org Registered

RD

	3. 03-28-2008 16:14
	Simple and straight forward instructions for installing DST. Good. Guest

Alex

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