Daylight Savings, Firefox update

I hope you all remembered to put your clock back an hour last night - and that you've checked your computers this morning to make sure that they did the same correctly. This is the first year that the new daylight savings rules - decided upon by the US Government but adopted by most Canadian jurisdictions too - came into effect with Standard time coming in November instead of October.

Your systems (Microsoft as well as Linux and MAC) should have received an updated Timezone data file some time early this year - and if your computer correctly moved to Daylight time it should also have correctly moved back to Standard time. But of course programmers and administrators are known to make mistakes, so this is a time to look and check - and call me if you notice problems.

You should also get an update to Firefox - either automatically or manually - to version 2.0.0.9 - to cure some cross-site scripting issues that really should have been fixed by Microsoft - but who's counting :)
www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

SANS Internet Storm Center also notes that one of the Domain Name Service "root" servers has changed its IP address. This does not happen very often - but it is worthy of note because there is not automated way for your computer to change this information. The root servers are where all DNS lookups start if your local machine doesn't already know where a machine is - and their addresses are stored in a file on your computer that was created when the machine was first set up - shipped with the operating system install disk or put there by the company who created your computer.

I'll be looking after updating the various Linux servers I look after for my customers - but the note at SANS gives instructions for Windows users. They're brief - but if you have problems, please give me a call. They also note that "this isn't an urgent update..."
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=3607