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Over the past few weeks I have gotten asked several times about what we are doing at St. Mark’s about the date changes for the start and end of Daylight Savings Time (DST). The US Congress passed the Energy Policy Act in August 2005 that moves the start of DST three weeks earlier and the end one week later.

We looked at every component, operating system and application for possible issues with the Daylight Savings Time change. Of course, some are more critical than others.

We started with Windows/Exchange/Good Mobile Messaging knowing that they would be affected most by the changes. Microsoft recommends the following order for applying patches:

(Note that Microsoft has different guidance for organization that rely heavily on Outlook Web Access.)

For the first step we manually patched our Windows 2003 servers, this went smoothly for us.
We used WSUS to push out the operating system patches to our Windows XP desktops.
After step 3 we had to update Good Messaging Server to 4.9.3. Then we ran the Exchange Calendar Update tool. We didn’t have to immediately update our Palm OS Treos because we have them set to use network time and we don’t use any of the native applications. We probably will get to updating them later on.

As for our Linux boxes, all of them are running Centos 4.4 and are patched (via yum) with the latest tzdata packages, they also are set to use NTP. NTP is running on our Asterisk box, and relies only on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) – DST information is handled by the operating system.

We then looked at the various applications we have running and found that all of our applications rely on the operating system for time and date, so no patching was necessary. I would still check on each application and verify that it isn’t affected. Note: Some applications running Java Development Kits or Virtual Machines may need to be updated.

For our Linksys IP SPA-941 and SPA-922 phones we have to update the DST string to:
start=3/8/7/2:0:0;end=11/1/7/2:0:0;save=1

Our surveillance camera vendor, Envysion released a patch for their DVR software, instructions are here.

Our Cisco network infrastructure is all configured to use NTP, so it should be fine but we are looking at the patches.

Others on DST updates:
Jason Powell – 2007 Daylight Savings Time Changes This Year
Tony Dye – DST Update Woes
Techsoup Discussion on DST
Technorati Search: Daylight Savings Time

Microsoft
Cisco

Update: Geeks Are Sexy points to a great site (DSTPatch.com) for addressing DST issues.

St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church of Jersey City posted the presentation for the Prayer of the Anointing of the Sick (Unction Prayer). The presentation is in English, Coptic and Arabic and requires a Windows machine with Microsoft PowerPoint or PowerPoint Viewer.

Prayer of the Anointing of the Sick
Coptic Fonts

I have several things hung up on a wall in my home office, I often get asked for copies so here they are:

Software Wars. A graphic map depicting the epic struggle of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) against the Empire of Microsoft.

How Projects Really Work (version 1.0). The Original. (You can create your own version of the cartoon at Project Cartoon)

“I Am Greatness Personified” – Pearls Before Swine

Anthony Coppedge’s Reality Triangle

Lifehacker recommended ScrubIT today, a DNS service that “scrubs out the bad stuff.” Similar to OpenDNS they intercept misspelled phishing sites but also scrubs pornography and malicious sites.

ScrubIT looks like a simple way to get basic content filtering on your machine or network, simply by changing your DNS. We have been struggling to find a good content filter solution for the church, we did deploy DansGuardian, but it was quite a bit of work to setup and has a few issues, especially when working with SSL. We were able to start using ScrubIT with just a few seconds of work.

To use ScrubIT your must change your DNS to:
67.138.54.100
207.225.209.66

For the individual user, ScrubIT offers a DNS Config Utility that configures Windows XP or 2000.

OpenDNS has instructions on how to configure other operating systems, routers and DNS forwarding. To use ScrubIT with those instructions, just replace the OpenDNS addresses with the SrcubIT addresses (sorry OpenDNS).

From an enterprise perspective, OpenDNS looks to be much more mature, offering DNS servers in five different locations and a system status page. Hopefully ScrubIT will provide the same features soon.

We decided to go ahead try out ScrubIT at the church, we are running DNS on our Windows Server 2003. We configured forwarders to ScrubIT DNS IP addresses.

For more control, ScrubIT is running a beta program that let’s you customize DNS to specifically allow or deny websites. It would be great if they added reporting as well.