Time bobbles

[Paul Eggert]

> Received: from lecserver.nci.nih.gov (localhost [127.0.0.1])
> 	by lecserver.nci.nih.gov (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id l2SDSIlX004500;
> 	Wed, 28 Mar 2007 08:28:18 -0500 (EST)
> Received: (from olsona at localhost)
> 	by lecserver.nci.nih.gov (8.13.6/8.13.6/Submit) id l2SDS1lb004487;
> 	Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:28:01 -0400 (EDT)
> ...
> Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:27:53 -0400
> From: "Olson, Arthur David \(NIH/NCI\) [E]" <olsona at dc37a.nci.nih.gov>
> 
> Word from a Washington, DC-area AOL subscriber is that their outgoing
> electronic mail is still being marked with "EST" time stamps that are an
> hour behind wall clock time. Do folks know of other high-visibility
> bobbles of the change in US DST rules?

There was a bobble in your message headers (look for "EST" above);
does that count as high visibility?

Most likely your message's bobble was because the main 'sendmail'
daemon on lecserver.nci.nih.gov started running before its tz tables
got patched.  (The sendmail submit process on the same host knew the
right time zone.)

The tz database was fixed in August 2005.  Do you happen to know when
the patch was propagated to lecserver.nci.nih.gov, and when was its
sendmail daemon last restarted?

Anyway, if AOL is using long-running sendmail daemons or similar
technology, that could explain the problem right there.

I just now checked my incoming email's headers.  Of the 305 messages
being sent to me from the Pacific time zone where the 'Received:' line
helpfully says "PST" or "PDT", 70 said "PST".  That's an error rate of
23%.  But all of the errors can be tracked down to a single email
server, kasavah.noc.ucla.edu, which I guess I'll send an error report
to now.