Monday, 8 October 2007

NZ Time Zone Changes in Windows

Maybe if you're like me, you changed the time manually on your three servers a week ago when Daylight Saving started, and thought no more of it until you logged in this morning and discovered all the servers had reset themselves to an hour later than the current time, as well as your desktop...

This happened to us because, even though we use Windows Server Update Services,

  1. We have only approved auto-installation of Critical Updates and Security Updates, and this update is an Update Rollup.
  2. We have not approved auto-installation of updates for our Windows servers, and this update is therefore not yet installed on them.

We also have a Linux server that acts as the time server for many PCs and this has to have its own update done.

In addition you may have Windows clients in your network running Windows 2000 or older. Microsoft is not making updates available in the usual distribution channels for these operating systems because mainstream support is not available for them any more. However unofficial updates can be found for 2000, ME and 98 or you can apply a manual update.

The update for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is KB933360. It appeared on WSUS on 29th August.

Solution: I had to wait all day to get the patch installed on our servers because other updates were waiting to be installed first and they required the servers to be restarted. It took two installation and restart cycles for each server to get them up to date with this patch. Then the time had to be set on each server to the current time. Still, at least now my desktop is showing and keeping the correct time.