GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover?

Several readers alerted us to this piece in PC World reporting on concerns that GoDaddy might not be ready for the DST changeover. Some readers, and others, claimed that GoDaddy's servers are not reachable now and are not serving email or web sites; but others see no evidence of this. The article recounts the rather flip response one GoDaddy customer got from their tech support: "As Daylight Savings [sic] does not apply to our servers, since we are on Arizona Time and our time zone does not change, our servers wouldn't update." When IDG News Service contacted GoDaddy they got an altogether more sensible reply.

Re:if there is a possibility for a screwup ...

[tomstdenis]

Well you see.... *points to elephant in corner* ====> who me? [linuxtoday.com]

Tom

DST?

[Xandu]

The real question is, is the problem DST related, or is it a coincidence?

Sure, it happened around the day of the change. Sure, they were pretty flip about responding to peoples' questions about their DST change readyness. But is it fair to jump to the conclusion that it [the outage] is because of the new DST rules? It could be that they are incompetent in other ways. ;-)

Payback for running MS

[Anonymous Coward]

With much noise and fanfare, Godaddy announced that they were being paid to run MS on its server. So it's no surprise GoDaddy can no longer handle even minor changes like DST. Why is this article here? So we can laugh, and say "told you so" ?

Admitting it now

[rhyno46]

I can confirm that they were down, but it looks like they might be coming back up. Some of my hosts are responding now.

For a bit, the GoDaddy support site mentions "technical difficulty". Godaddy.com [godaddy.com]

The Internet Storm Center has notes, too: SANS Internet Storm Center [sans.org]

Re:Timezones

[Anonymous Coward]

It is. The problem is that if you use UTC for dates in the future, and the government comes along and changes local time, you're fucked. Especially when you can't figure out whether a date was stored before or after the government changed it, or after the computer was patched, or if some computers are patched and some aren't.

Use UTC for time synchronization, timestamps for historical data, and identifying the time now. Use local time for all future dates, or next time the government decides to play with the clock, we'll be going through all this crap all over again.

Re:Uhh.. Whats not "sensible" about that answer?

[Qzukk]

I can't speak for our Windows bretheren, but our AIX boxes required absolutely no patching. Our servers calibrate against a UTC source, and the patch IBM offers only affects the optional right-hand portion of $TZ in /etc/environment...A field that doesn't exist if you're MST-7 w/o DST.

GoDaddy's response is entirely sensible.

Unless, of course, people try to connect to their server from outside of the timezone, say on a website that takes the current time converts it to the user's timezone (set by a cookie or account preferences) and shows it to them such as 99.9% of the forum and blog software out there (lol, slashdot can display everything in utc and let the users figure it out themselves)

Good thing that none of the sites GoDaddy hosts runs any software like that, right?

Re:DST?

[drmerope]

This whole article is bogus. GoDaddy started having troubles several days ago. It has nothing to do with DST. It does, however, demonstrate people's propensity to find evidence in mere coincidence.

MOD DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

previous response [slashdot.org]

GP is correct, actually. Suppose a user schedules an event for 9 am local time. The server re-maps this to UTC, then stores the UTC time. Then, government comes along and changes the mapping between local time and UTC by rescheduling the start of DST. Now, when the server maps back from UTC, the event ends up as 8 am local time. This is probably not what the user wanted.

you're an idiot.