[CentOS] 2038 year Problem

Thu Oct 4 09:57:03 UTC 2018
Mark Rousell <mark.rousell at signal100.com>

On 03/10/2018 14:31, Larry Martell wrote:
>
> It only went smoothly because there were people like me fixing the issues ;-)

In that case perhaps I should take some of the credit for writing code
that never had a Y2K problem in the first place. ;-)

> 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."

I think this shows that it was partly an industry-related issue. At the
ISP I mentioned, the vast majority of the systems were Y2K-compliant and
had ended up that way through the normal process of upgrades and patches
over many years. (Well, apart from the single, major semi-proprietary
system we knew about anyway). However, your employer (and your
employer's industry) was very different: It clearly ran numerous
disparate code bases, many developed in house, many of which were
non-compliant and whose compliance was unknown until you found and fixed
them.

I was definitely in the wrong industry!

-- 
Mark Rousell