I've heard it from many people, "you've just got to fix Windows." And, "I've made my own hack for the DST problem." But, there are a number of patches that need to happen in a network to handle the DST problem, and those patches affect more than just the Windows O/S.

I blogged last week on the problem as well as the affected Microsoft products. Please do either check out that blog piece and/or the referenced Microsoft web site on the DST problem found here.

One of the biggest misconceptions I've heard so far is, "I point my Windows servers to an NTP server for their time. If the NTP server is patched, then my Windows server will get the time zone change updated correctly." This is not true. NTP servers and the NTP protocol that they leverage does not have any recognition of time zones. A server that points to an NTP server only gets GMT time (also called UTC time) from that NTP server. Its the NTP client that adds an offset associated with it's time zone.

For an example of this, double-click the time on your Windows XP or Vista machine, then the time zone tab. You'll see, for example, (GMT -07:00) for the Mountain Time zone. It's that time zone offset that needs to be patched so the NTP client offsets time properly after the DST change.

Don't forget that this can affect other devices on your network as well. Any device that has an internal time zone configuration will need some sort of patch.