Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 09:10:31 +0100 (MET) From: Dirk-Willem van Gulik <Dirk.vanGulik@jrc.it> To: Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu> Cc: "tien@bisnews.co.th" <tien@bisnews.co.th>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: year 2000 compliance Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.96.980114090524.8962L-100000@elect6.jrc.it> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980113191719.24708H-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu>
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On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Doug White wrote: > On Mon, 12 Jan 1998, tien@bisnews.co.th wrote: > > > I have questions regarding year 2000 compliance of FreeBSD > > version 2.1.5. Is FreeBSD 2.1.5 year 2000 compliant? Do you have > > any document support on your compliance status? Where could I get > > all the information about FreeBSD year 2000 compliance? Your > > answers are very essential to us in order to develop our systems. > > Can you please reply to us as soon as possible. > > UNIX systems in general should be year 2000 OK. UNIX/FreeBSD represent > time as seconds since Jan 1, 1970, so they are OK until they fill up a 32 > bit integer, which would occur in 2038 or so if technology never advanced. > We are on the brink of 64-bit machines, though, and no doubt that the size > will increase well before there's a problem. > > Most, if not all, of the system utilities do their work using this format > (time_t), so they should not be affected either. > > The big problem is in user utilities. Not everyone may know about time_t > and used 2 digit years. You should check your user programs out; easiest > way is to build a test box, set the date to Dec 31, 1999, 11:59pm and > watch for fireworks. :) At some point you should check your server > hardware that they roll the date properly (esp. really really old stock). And in particular the common internet servers; such as mail, web and news; all three protocols (smtp, http and nntp) allow for date representations which a 2 digit year, rather than 4. In other words they possibly use an (ascii) representation on the wire (i.e. on the network connection to the client) which, through derived from the correct internal time_t value, is not unambigious. This can cause a problem for each century wrap around. For example the popular web server apache its proxy was recently 'patched' for this. Easy catches are caching on http, sorting on mail and fetches with news. Dw. > Hope this helps. > > Doug White | University of Oregon > Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant > http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major > > > http://cils.ceo.org http://enrm.ceo.org dirkx@technologist.com Dirk.vanGulik@jrc.it +39 332 78 0014 +39 332 78 9549 fax +39 332 78 9185 ISEI/ESBA; The Center For Earth Observation Joint Research Centre of the European Communities, Ispra, Italy
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