We received an email this morning from one of our readers saying that his server that was scheduled for reboot at 3:00am did not reboot. Upon investigation he discovered that the his updated and patched APC Power Management Software was the problem. 

Here is what Alan had to say:

I have a box running APC Powerchute 7.0.5.108 on Windows Server 2003 SP1 that was scheduled to shutdown and restart one of my systems at 3:00 AM today but didn't do the shutdown until 4:00 AM.

According to my staff, APC had reported that earlier editions of Powerchute had a DST issue, but 7.0.5 was corrected, yet this doesn't appear to be correct. The W2K3 server did update the time correctly to the new DST at 2:00 AM this morning and is reflecting the correct Eastern DST.

Further investigation shows that what actually occurred is that the DST change altered my schedule from 3:00 AM to 4:00 AM on a permanent basis. So I was attempting to verify on the APC website that the version was actually the corrected version and that this was not an error on the part of my staff.

Since then, I have checked other W2K3 boxes with this Powerchute version and found that the change actually advanced my scheduled shutdown time by one hour rather than actually correcting DST.

So it looks like a problem exists with Powerchute.

Alan indicated that he is not able to get any information from the APC web site because they have chosen today to take the site down for maintenance. 

So those of you that are running Powerchute software may want to check you systems.