Preparing for 2012..

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Jenk
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Preparing for 2012..

Post by Jenk »

Wasn't sure if this should be in here or is just a GD topic, but anyway..

What measures can (should) be taken to prepare for the *nix equivalent of the y2k bug?

(For those that do not know, the Unix EPOC clock is an integer of seconds from the 'birth' of Unix, or more precisely Jan 1 00:00 1970, there are more seconds between some date in 2012 and the Unix EPOC than an integer can contain)

One of my friends informed me last night that they intend to force the unix clock back to Zero, as did another firend/colleague in this company.

This to me doesn't seem like a 'throrough' work around.. I asked him:

"What happens if your machines suddenly think it is 1970?" and he couldn't reply..

I sure by then the creators of the many distro's will have a solid solution, but for those of us who do not intend on changing distro's or OS (namely corporate machines), what choices do we have, other than convincing the cheque payer they need new software?
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Weirdan
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Post by Weirdan »

Wikipedia wrote: Being 32 bits (of which one bit is the sign bit) means that it covers a range of about 136 years in total. The minimum representable time is 1901-12-13T20:45:52Z, and the maximum representable time is 2038-01-19T03:14:07Z. At 2038-01-19T03:14:08Z this representation will overflow. This milestone is anticipated with a mixture of amusement and dread; see the separate section below.
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

the "easy" fix would be using a 64-bit integer for time_t. Now, if people didn't use time_t as their type in code, you'll have an issue.. but that's programmer error ;)
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Jenk
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Post by Jenk »

so we have an extra 26years to worry about it then :P

I was actually just thinking about the core of the server over the use of the unix timestamp in programming for now, but that does pose another problem :)
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