Hey fellow system administrators in British Columbia! As you may have heard, our province is finally stopping the biannual clock changes. Today marks the last time we spring forward, and we won't fall back in six months. Everything went smoothly this morning, but I'm curious about how vendors are handling this transition. Will Microsoft provide an update for us? What about our Linux distributions and various appliances? Personally, I've got some Cisco and Linksys equipment in my homelab VOIP setup that I'll need to adjust, but I'm wondering about the bigger picture.
5 Answers
For your Cisco and Linksys gear, you might need to manually adjust the settings. Just watch out for anything that still needs to be configured for Daylight Saving time, as you’ll need to clear those old entries to avoid confusion.
Typically, major vendors will include time zone updates in their regular patches. The tricky part will be dealing with older appliances and legacy systems that haven't been maintained. Those could continue to change time automatically despite the new rules.
Honestly, I envy you British Columbians! Our time zone changes come from the IANA Time Zone Database, which gets updated regularly. Microsoft and Linux will integrate those updates soon. But expect to run into a bunch of older systems behaving erratically when the change hits.
Updating all your equipment is a pain, I remember back in 2020 when vendors released updates slowly. Some devices were never updated at all, so we set many to Arizona time permanently just to make sure they wouldn’t keep adjusting.
You're right about ongoing issues with legacy systems. The rule of thumb is to set anything unsupported to a fixed timezone, like UTC-6. This way, you can avoid the biannual chaos. Just be prepared for some systems to still switch times regardless.
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