03.08.07
Hey Indiana, knock that shit off
The powers that be at Pulaski County, IN, have decided that the Central Time Zone isn’t good enough for them. They’re jumping ship to the Eastern Time Zone. You see, in the United States, there really is no federally mandated Time Zone zones. What I mean is, each governing entity decides which time zone it will belong to as the “official” time zone for its jurisdiction. For most states and counties, it’s a no-brainer. If you’re in the middle of a time zone, you pretty much declare that time zone as the official one. For those states and counties that are on the borderline between two zones, however, you get mixed results.
Take Michigan, for example. The majority of Michigan is in the Eastern Time Zone. I say ‘majority’ because there is a chunk of land most people forget about on the other side of Lake Michigan that belongs to the State of Michigan. Four counties in that chunk have declared that they are in the Central Time Zone. It’s been that way for a while now and everyone is happy.
Now, normally, I could care less about what time zone a governing entity recognizes as their own.
Pick one and live with it. Live and Let Live, right? Oh no. Indiana has to be different. They’ve been at the center of a time zone controversy for quite some time. For reference, check out this Wikipedia article (assuming you still put stock in Wikipedia’s ability to provide accurate information.)
Why am I all bitchy and cranky about it? Because, after several weeks of patching servers for the pending Daylight Saving Time changes, I got an email from Redhat about a new tzdata package with updates for a few countries and the US/Indiana time zone. What really gets me is it’s 3 farking days before DST goes in to effect and I have to repatch a ton of systems! I can understand whole countries making changes, but Indiana has been doing this shit for decades. Cut it out, assholes!
Sure, I could write a simple script that’ll ssh into each and run ’sudo up2date tzdata’ - would take less than an hour to do them all. Unfortunately, when touching production systems, we have to go through a Change Control process that involves writing up a Change Request (estimated time to complete, downtime expected?, completion steps, rollback plan, etc.) and get approvals. It’s a pain in the ass process, albeit a very necessary one. It’s less than 2 days away, to boot.
