[sdnog] Impact of new timezone in Sudan

[Philip Paeps]

On 2017-10-24 22:15:56 (+0200), Manhal Mohammed wrote:
> We all know that Sudan will change its timezone from GMT+3  to GMT+2  
> after few days  "1st of November "
> so I'm curious about the effect of this change on services,  
> transactions,  SSLs  licences, DB. .. etc?
> specially the services with timestamps :/
> Also what will be the impact of this change on  ISPs ?

As Patrick pointed out: if you're running your servers and 
infrastructure on UTC (which you really, really, really should be 
doing), you should not have any serious problems.  Time will continue to 
move monotonically forward.  Anything that converts your UTC timestamps 
to local time will need to be aware of the new timezone though.

You should make sure that anything which cares about timezones has the 
updated timezone data (2017c of tzinfo) installed:

https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2017-October/000047.html

This hasn't landed in FreeBSD yet, but it will soon (people have been 
prodded and worst case I can do it).  Other operating systems will 
probably update soon too.

Stopping all services for an hour is probably overreacting but it might 
be wise to do a sanity-check of billing systems in particular.  If 
they're running on local time, you will need to figure out what happens 
when time moves backwards.  If the hour between 02:00 and 03:00 local 
time happens twice, you may want to point this out to your customers.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Ministry of Information