DST and Timer Jobs
Now that daylight savings has arrived in the United States, have you noticed problems with timer jobs not running when expected?
I recently encountered this trying to deploy solution packages using stsadm scripts. In the past, these scripts ran flawlessly. The old solutions were retracted and deleted, the new solution versions added and deployed across all farm servers within a few minutes, and life was good.
Last week I was working with a customer to deploy a new staging farm. We got to the point at which the solution deployment scripts were run. We waited, and waited, and waited. The script was hung at stsadm –o execadmsvcjobs, which was called after executing several stsadm –o deploysolution -name solutionpackage1.wsp -immediate -force –allowGacDeployment statements. What should have happened is the timer jobs to deploy the solution across the farm servers should have executed within about a minute. Instead, over an hour passed. Then suddenly, the jobs ran. What caused this odd behavior, which had never happened before with the same scripts? Was there a farm configuration problem?
Then a thought occurred. The time had changed to daylight savings a week before; moving the clocks ahead one hour. Could there be a connection?
A little research brought the problem to light. WSS 3.0 SP1 includes fixes to timer job DST scheduling problems. See 938663 ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938663/ ) One-time timer jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are delayed by at least one hour when the jobs are scheduled to occur during daylight saving time (DST).
A quick check in Central Administration > Operations > Servers in Farm, showed the installed version number was 12.0.0.4518. It should have been 12.0.0.6219 if SP1 was installed. We installed WSS 3.0 SP1, and the timer job scheduling problem disappeared!
I strongly encourage installation of WSS/MOSS SP1. It fixes many issues, DST just being one example. Taken time to read and following the installation instructions precisely! Remember, you have to update all servers in the farm at once. There is no rolling update, so if you have a multiple server farm with large content databases, plan on doing this over a weekend to avoid disrupting your user community.
