Re: Y2K, UP2000, RH6.1

[Michal Jaegermann <michal ellpspace math ualberta ca>]

Thomas Weyergraf wrote:
> 
> 
> on Dec 21, last century, I turned off all machines to make sure, I do
> not run into any Y2K issues.

Well, you just created one - a denial of service. :-)

BTW - Red Hat brought some last minute Y2K fixes in the last days
of Decemeber.  Nothing earth shattering - sharutils, groff and libtiff.
Also if you are running an older distribution then elm-2.4, if you
are using it, prints year '100' in its "internal" header ("the real"
mail headers are fine).  The simplest cure is to grab source rpm
for elm-2.5, the one which comes with 6.1, 'rpm --rebuild elm...',
and install resulting binaries.  A stupid bug in elm-2.4 sources
is also not hard to find.

> 
> The UP2000, running RH 6.1 jumped 52 years to 2052.
...
> While a simple 'date' setting the correct date followed by a 'hwclock
> -systohc' solved the 'problem', I find it amusing,

In the past, with an older version of SRM on UP2000, I have seen many
times that firmware on this board is very often confused about a state
of its hardware clock and comes during a boot with pretty wild dates
scattered all over the place.  This was basically cured by SRM updates
although I am not sure if 100% (smells like a race condition somewhere
in SRM and multiple processors may have something to do with it).  A
difference of 52 years sounds suspiciously like that gotcha and if this
is the case it has nothing to do with a year 2000.

> Anyway, I hope you find this as amusing as i did 8-)

Glad to hear that you had some fun. :-)


  Michal