Re: Y2k Compliance - there's a topic here?

Eric Sorenson (eric@satanic.org)
Fri, 7 May 1999 01:48:32 -0700 (PDT) 

On Tue, 4 May 1999, Ethan wrote:

> On Tue, 4 May 1999, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> 
> > Ethan's remarks interested me, because I recently took responsibility for
> > a library's systems, including an HP-UX box.  Turns out HP-UX 10.20 is not
> > compliant, but I don't seem to be able to find out exactly how.  There's
> > just this big pile of patches that they're offering.  (Fortunately (!?),
> > our automation system provider is one of those, "You don't need to know,"
> > types.  So I don't have to do the work, I just have to clean up if it
> > breaks.  What a good deal!  Eeeuughhh.)
> 
> Best way to test is to change the system date to 2000, restart, and see 
> if it still works.  I remember testing this way on my linux box a while 
> back; it was amusing because while I could set the date forward, I 
> couldn't just as easily set it backwards again...

Other useful dates to test for Y2K compliance (really to test
date-handling in general, as some of these are not necessarily related to
the millenium):

09/09/1999 - it's mostly a COBOL thing ... "oops"
12/31/1999 - let it roll over midnight
02/29/2000 - yes there IS a leap day next year
12/31/2000 - another midnight rollover test

It's important to let things run for a bit after changing the date,
particularly for the rollover tests. The OS may boot just fine but your
apps may be deeply (sometimes subtly) screwed up. 

> As an interesting test case, take XFree86 on my x86 linux box.  It 
> counts time not in seconds, but in 100th's of seconds.  The rollover is 
> thus every 248 days.  If AfterStep is left running this long (or just 
> happens to hit the rollover), strange things happen.

Old SunOS machines have this problem too.

-=Eric

-- 
Do you lie for booze? -----------> eric sorenson <------------
Sell your soul to the Devil? ----> http://satanic.org <-------
Alcoholic, me? -- Mr Jenkins haiku from http://www.zeldman.com



--
   WWW:   http://www.afterstep.org/
   FTP:   ftp://ftp.afterstep.org/
   MAIL:  http://www.calderasystems.com/linuxcenter/forums/afterstep.html