Year 2000

10 or 15 years ago, most Unix programmers didn't think about year 2000. And the program code was used over and over, until the first warnings from customers (with service contracts lasting over year 2000) came.

SunOS 4.1.1 isn't year 2000 safe. But while Sparc users can upgrade to SunOS 4.1.4, which HAS patches for Year 2000 (sic!!!), we poor Sun3 users can shoot ourself into the foot! Thanks Sun!

IMHO it wouldn't be any problem for Sun to fix these problems, because the program code for the Sun3's is exactly the same.

Alas, we have to help ourself!

I grabbed all year 2000 patches for SunOS 4.1.4 and studied the READMEs. It doesn't look that bad after all:

date: Will show wrong dates and won't let root set a date beyond year 2000
touch: Does produce wrong timestamps. /usr/5bin/touch won't convert dates beyond 2000 correctly
w: Does show wrong login times
bar: Verbose output shows bad dates.
passwd: Password expire won't work beyond 2000
eeprom: Can't set HW-Update to dates beyond 2000
at, atq: Shows wrong dates and doesn't work correctly after 2000
libc functions: The functions strftime and strptime aren't year 2000 safe. Luckily SunOS 4.1.1 uses shared libraries so we won't have to recompile every program which uses these functions
troff macros: All macros handling dates have to be changed
SCCS: All programms have to be changed and recompiled
accounting: All programms have to be changed and recompiled
timezones: Some timezone files have changed in the meantime. This is not exactly a year 2000 issue, but should be fixed too

So i sat down and did it.

Download

The latest y2k-patch can be downloaded here. Check out the README.

Disclaimer: It's always YOUR fault, if something breaks.