The Year 2007 Problem

January 19, 2007

Slipping silently under the radar screen of many companies has been the upcoming changes to Daylight Savings Time, scheduled to impact systems the second week in March 2007. Much like in the months preceding the turn of the century, many business systems, including Microsoft Exchange 2007, will require updates to address hard-coded dependencies in Microsoft software. We're calling this the "Year 2007" problem here at Azaleos.

In 1999, I was given a plaque labeled "Year 2000: Use in case of Emergency" --- with an easily detachable pencil for use if all of the computers were to go down due to the change in the millenium impacting systems. We all might need to sharpen our pencils now and remember that time once again.

What's this all about?

Previously, daylight savings time started in many time zones on the first Sunday in April at 2:00am. This year, the US government is implementing provisions in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which will change the start date of DST to the second Sunday in March at 2:00am.

This means that any time-dependent software application which expects the time to change in April - such as Microsoft Exchange --- may need a patch to change its expectation of the change to daylight savings time to be much earlier.

Some unexpected areas that need to be considered include any software that leverages secure authentication mechanisms such as Kerberos between distributed, or client/server systems. A time difference between such systems (perhaps a client patched with the update, and a server unpatched) of more than 5 minutes can mean that access to that server or services on that system may be denied.

Expected Impact to our customers

The impact of this to customers using Microsoft software, including Exchange, is to an estimated 140 million users of Microsoft Exchange worldwide. All Exchange servers need to be updated with the latest patches from Microsoft.

Further, there are no apparent updates available for the unsupported Exchange 5.5, which will be a headache for administrators who have not made the upgrade from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 or 2003 --- with potentially unexpected consequences to any applications that are intertwined with Exchange.

Microsoft has recently started to release a set of patches to various systems from its support sites at support.microsoft.com. For more information on these updates, check out http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=926666.

What Azaleos will do

All Azaleos customers will be patched prior to March 2007 with the supplied updates, so that our customers Exchange systems will have no perceived impact. We recommend that our customers review all systems for need to apply the Microsoft patches to minimize the impact of the "Year 2007 Problem".