Note the time stamp. Most Americans just “fell back” and are getting an extra hour of sleep. A few are up because it is their job to provide essential services (e.g. police, firefighting) just like on other nights. A very few would be asleep, but are up precisely because of falling back. I am one of them.

The County’s computers run on local time. Many of the systems depend on system generated time stamps to register when events happen. During this hour, this could have peculiar results. E.g. suppose somebody was booked at the jail at 1:45 AM CDT and then released 1/2 hour later. The time stamps would make it look like he had been released before he was arrested! This is the actual example we used in our planning.

So a lot of our servers, where we have such systems, have been shut down or otherwise disabled between 1:59 AM CDT and 2:01 AM CST. The jail is aware of this and is functioning manually for this however.

The simplest way to do this is to schedule automatic tasks to shut down and restart SQL Server (my particular responsibility) at this time. I have automated this process and the last couple years I was able to sleep through the whole thing. Unfortunately, this year the Criminal Justice folks wanted one system to remain up in read-only mode during this period. I was able to automate this as well, but could not fully test it, not being able to create a test environment with all the interacting pieces where I could adjust the system clocks. So I have to stay up and babysit the process, and e-mail other staff when the system state changes.

In fact, the automated set to read only worked perfectly: All I had to do was forward the e-mail it sent me. I expect the reset back to read-write to work as well. Maybe I can sleep through this business next year.

Of course, this whole business is a kludge. The correct way would be to use UTC(essentially Greenwich Mean Time) for all recorded times and use local time just for display. A few systems do just that. Unfortunately, the County has lots of systems, and many of those record time stamps in local time. These systems interact in many ways, so all of them would have to be converted at once. This makes for a really big project, for which we have neither time nor budget. Also, some of the most difficult systems are on the IBM mainframes, and are being replaced anyway. So we limp along like this