[CentOS] 2038 year Problem

Wed Oct 3 13:31:58 UTC 2018
Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com>

On Tue, Oct 2, 2018 at 9:46 PM Mark Rousell <mark.rousell at signal100.com> wrote:
>
> On 02/10/2018 18:46, Larry Martell wrote:
> > I got 2 years of work solving the year 2000 issue.
>
> I don't think I've ever said this but I am very envious of all these
> people who had loads of work due to Y2K or were paid obscene amounts of
> money to tend systems over new year's eve/day.
>
> I was working for an ISP at the time and got none of this. Nothing
> happened. I don't even recall any special precautions being taken (apart
> from below). No over time, no obscene amounts of money.
>
> Admittedly there was a Y2K audit earlier in the year and so I presume
> that the consultants who did it got paid some obscene amounts of money.
> As I recall, they found very little except for one major system that we
> knew would need updating anyway. And I presume that the contractor who
> came in to fix the major system was rather well paid too.
>
> But no money for me. <sulk> Wrong job, wrong time, wrong place, I guess.
> Perhaps I should be pleased the actual 99/00 changeover went so smoothly
> afterall.

It only went smoothly because there were people like me fixing the issues ;-)

I worked on Wall St at the time, and I got a reputation for being able
to find and fix Y2K issues. Really all that I did was grep the code
bases for 2 digit years, and code that blindly added 1900 to them.
There were a ton of those cases. It was not atypical for me to find
500-1000 or more such cases at each site. The fixes were easy but the
testing took a while. I did this for banks, hedge funds, brokerages,
bond traders, etc.

At one place where I had fixed probably 700 cases, after Y2K came and
went without an incident the CEO said "You made such a big deal about
this, and then nothing happened."