Ok – hopefully this will be the last DST post – until Monday morning of course when we discover all of the bugs that nobody thought of until it was too late. All of my customers boxes are now patched as of 8.55pm on Friday night. I dread to think how much time has been spent on this exercise. For those of you that are wondering, one of the reasons we didn’t do it earlier was the number of changes to the patches that have come out of Microsoft and other companies – indeed I spotted a post on one of the blog feeds about a patch coming out this afternoon!
I’m off to enjoy a relaxing weekend and some birthday cake on Sunday!

1. Wait until the last minute before releasing patches, notifications and alerts to your customers and endusers.
2. Get your IT staff (or better yet somebody else’s) to apply the patch out of business hours, preferably after you have worked your evening overtime, so say 10pm BUT before 11.30 when the backup kicks in.
3. Hey presto, your IT staff are too tired as they were working late so they sleep in and therefore don’t use any extra electricity or energy whilst they are in bed in the morning instead of being at work – et voila – you have saved some energy.

After giving just over a weeks notice on the previous patch for daylight savings time, TODAY they announced a new service pack. Just what do they think IT professionals are doing this week? We don’t need to start installing more patches on servers 3 days before DST kicks in. I’m already working at 10pm as it is!

We received an email from Verizon to inform us that the Monitorsync software that synchronizes Exchange with Verizon’s web service (and then cellphones) also needs a patch for daylight savings time. Great timing with less than a week to go!
I did my first Exchange server/Timezone change tonight and the process is more complicated than it should be, but not as complicated as it could be. My notes from the patch is in the extended entry but note that I am not an expert and that advice should be taken from Microsoft’s official DST website

If you are installing the Kronos DST patch and it prompts you for the database owner username and password, use tkcsowner for both username and password. This seems a bit of a security loophole (you can also find the default password for the suprkron username on google too). Entering this into the upgrade routine, you will be able to continue with the upgrade and not have to wait up to 4 hours for a tech to call you back with this information.
Note that these are default passwords and available in google searches quite easily IF you know these are the usernames that you need.
Oh, and by the way you need to reboot after the installation 🙁