Posted on 03/09/2008 6:07:42 AM PDT by samtheman
However, persons still operating legacy servers such as Windows 2000 were dismayed to learn that Microsoft was sticking to its guns regarding their Windows 2000 EOL(End of Life). Hotfixes were made available for Windows XP and Server 2003, but the Windows 2000 hotfix (which does exist) has not seen public release. In order to obtain it, one must order it from their Microsoft Account Manager. I believe the current list price is $4000 for a site license to use the hotfix - a large sum for a systems administrator looking to update a small amount of servers.
(Excerpt) Read more at fastservers.net ...
But you won't find any reference to it on any MS support page. Of course.
At a price of $4,000.00, wouldn’t it just be easier to manually change the time on each machine? I know that it’s nice to have it done automatically, but isn’t the manual option still there?
Read the article. The tool is free. It resets the dates. Manually changing the time doesn’t work on a network. I’ve tried it.
This little tool really works.
bump for later
Thanks. I did read the article. I just didn’t know that a network didn’t have the same capability as an individual computer when it comes to changing the time. If they explained that in the article, then I missed it.
I stopped by the office on the way to church and noticed that our Linux/Unix systems had all moved up but none of the Windoze computers had ... how has it come to pass that this generally imcompetant operating system controls the world?
Even 20 some years ago, circa Novell 2.x, in the early days of PC networking there were batch file commands that would cause each workstation on the network to synch time with the server on bootup. All the sysadmin would have to do was to manually rest the time on the server.
You see, long long ago in 1981 there was this little Unix & BASIC company in Redmond called "Microsoft", that swung a deal with IBM about a new small computer IBM was bringing out. They bought a Quick-and-Dirty operating system, crossed out "QDOS" and wrote "MS-DOS" in crayon, sold their Unix business to SCO, licensed MSDOS to IBM, and the rest, as they say, is history.
In the consumer computing world, despite all the flash and glitz, DOS/Windows competence has yet to catch up with mid-70's Unix.
But you knew this already... ;-)
plus travel and expenses, of course.
I know. It’s strange. I tried net time /domain:domainname /set and it said it worked but didn’t work.
But I ran this little tool and it changed the registry values of the start and end dates for DST.
It says Windows 2000, but I also had one of my Server 2003 machines stuck on the bad time and this tool worked on that machine too.
These are the registry values it changes:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
ping
I have a GroupPolicy set up to sync all machines on my network to the time on a domain controller, which is server2003 and which had the right time automatically.
But I still had to use this fix on all my server2000 machines.
Unix/Linux (and Novell servers, as well) have the start and end dates of DST set as a text string in a configuration file. Changing it on these computers is trivial. In the case of Windows computers, the start and end dates of DST are set through the registry, and there's a free tool from MS, TZEDIT that will allow you to reset those dates quite easily, as well as checking to see that the change was made.
Mark
Time is extremely important on a network. It's how all the servers keep synchronized. If you have a lot of servers on the network, it can be rather time consuming to make the changes. For instance, the company that I work for has a mix of Windows 2003 and Windows 2000 servers, but the vast majority of those servers are Windows 2000, which DID need to be updated manually. BTW, if you just reset the time on a workstation manually, when the "old" DST start/end comes along, it will change the time on your again.
Mark
How new are your linux/unix computers? Do you have some sort of upgrade protection? The problem is with Congress, NOT Microsoft, at least not completely. Remember that Congress made the change last year. Somehow, that change was communicated to the linux/unix computers you use. If the OS was shipped after Congress made the change, that's why: Because they knew the start and end dates of DST. However, if Congress makes another change, the computers won't "know about it" unless there's some outside intervention again.
Mark
But I still had to use this fix on all my server2000 machines.
That's because the vast majority of networked computers don't actually use local time for synchronization. They use UTC (Universal Time Coordinated), which is Greenwich Mean Time, without DST. The local time that they display is an offset of UTC, based on the time zone and DST settings.
MS included the DST fix last year as part of the Windows Updates for XP and Windows Server 2003, but not for Windows 2000. Instead, in order to change the start and end dates for those systems, just download TZEDIT from Microsoft. It's easy to use and completly self explanatory. If the computer system isn't updated with the date for the earlier change over for DST, the local time change won't be seen until the old, later DST start/end date rolls around.
If this seems like a pain in the butt, it's really not, once you get used to it, plus it's extremely important for keeping servers and databases synchronized across multiple time zones.
Mark
just download TZEDITYou are right.
And that's what the posted article has you do, along with providing some extra details (such as how to activate the change once you've made it) and some interesting background info.
To me, the bottom line is that this is an MS tool that they provide for free but don't tell you about and pretend you need to spend $4000 to fix the problem.
Where's their sense of fair play? (kidding)
Actually, Microsoft really publicized the heck out the free fix (including a registry file that could be applied with GPOs) back when Congress first changed the start and end dates of DST last year. They actually went far beyond what many people thought they needed to do.
I guess that since it’s now 2008, and they went through all that trouble the last time, Microsoft felt that they didn’t need to do it again, since they figured that anyone using Windows 2000 had already applied the fix, and no new rollouts of Windows 2000 would be happening. I guess that they were wrong. But I won’t hold that against them.
They did a good job pointing out what needed to be done the first time. I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to be seeing this sort of article twice a year from now on, just so Microsoft can be bashed.
Mark
If we got rid of DST you wouldn’t have a problem.
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