NeilD's questions

I have a server running Windows 2008 on Amazon EC2. It's a standard Amazon AMI, without any major tweaks. The default time zone is "UTC".

I'm going to run an application that requires the server to be on the same time zone as Great Britain. At the moment, that is British Summer Time, but I'd like to have the usual automatic switch back to GMT in the winter.

When I look at the "Time Zone Settings" dialogue box there's no option for "Automatically adjust clock for Daylight Savings Time".

Where is this option located?

I have a number of scheduled tasks that run on various Windows servers. They are mostly custom console applications which we have written. Currently, when the app has finished running, we send out an email to our operators to confirm that it is complete.

This works fine in most cases, but the problem we've been having is if a scheduled task doesn't run for some reason. Currently, we've given them a list of emails that they ought to be expecting each morning, and they are expected to notice if one doesn't arrive.

I'd like to make this a more automated process.

So... How is best to go about notifying the operators if a task hasn't run? What about if the console app is started, but doesn't complete for some reason (crash, or whatever)?

Is email the way to go? Should we be sending out our notifications some other way? Do I need some more beefy scheduling software?

Apologies if this is well trodden ground... I'm a Dev, rather than an Admin, so this is outside my competence!