The Systems Engineer » time dst 2007 2008 citizien watch ntp cisco http://www.thesystemsengineer.com structured chaos Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:33:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Time Change. Spring 2008 http://www.thesystemsengineer.com/technical/time-change-spring-2008/ http://www.thesystemsengineer.com/technical/time-change-spring-2008/#comments Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:44:32 +0000 Trace http://www.thesystemsengineer.com/?p=8
Have you ever asked yourself what time is it really? If you are IT, you may have heard of Network Time Protocol. NTP is very useful, as it allows devices to communicate with a central server or set of servers to keep their time synchronized. This usually works great. Some people have time servers in their infrastructure that keep time very accurately.

DST was changed in 2007 so that it comes several weeks earlier and ends several weeks later. March 9th, 2008 was the date for us here in the USA. Saturday night most of us set our clocks 1 hour ahead. If your infrastructure runs NTP servers and clients you hopefully didn’t have much to do. Our Cisco Call Managers require that we edit a field in the database to show the new change over dates which was edited in 2007 for us. However they also require all of the phones to be reset after each change over. This can easily be done by resetting all devices at the device pool level.

I’m not sure if it is related to the time change or not by my Citizen Skyhawk watch appears to have an issue. Now this watch is pretty darn cool. It uses radio signals from the atomic clock in Boulder, CO which broadcasts the WWVB time code. Every day at 4am my watch listens to these signals and sets it’s time. What a great feature you may say, and I agree. However mine is not able to receive a signal at all right now. I’ve tried from my office which is on the 56th floor. I’ve tried from my home which is surrounded by concrete. It honestly usually works great from my home.

You may be thinking what does my watch have to do with any of this? Well I use the watch as a key way to tell if my NTP time settings on all of my devices is actually correct. Normally the time on my NTP server and my watch are exact. At least as exact as my eyes and mind can tell. You can bet I’ll be getting my watch repaired as soon as possible. Combining the accurate time with the always visible analog UTC time display my watch has and it is a valuable tool in the world of logs and troubleshooting.

I recommended you all take the time to see if your devices really think it is the same time you think it is.. You may be surprised at what time it is at your company.

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