Y2K

[Nobody's Hero]

Remember new years eve 99? "All critical employess must work in case of a disaster" At the stroke of midnight we all rushed to the kvm switch to execute a `date` command to see this horrible event unfold. I can remember the sounds. "hp1 is OK",,yea, HP2 is fine too? Lets check everything! The boss sitting on my shoulder. "Is everything still running?" "yea boss, looks like were gonna be Ok. "well I heard that there was a couple of problems over seas". "Well keep looking" I bet he bought 10 cases of bottled water and 20 cases of non-perishable food items. Like the water supply would stop pumping. Can't even flush a toilet.
Well look at us now. The only thing we need to worry about now is world peace. And lets all hope that something good happens! Happy new year and thanks to all on this forum who have helped me learn a gret deal of 'key learnings' over the past year.

[harry d brown jr]

Robert, a "Wishes" thread was already started:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x6f93afe90f1cd71190050090279cd0f9,00.html

live free or die
harry

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

I remember watching CNN as the New Year crept slowly around the world, becoming more and more encouraged by the lack of problems in New Zealand, Australia, India, and on.

Unfortunately, I think that Y2K was a piece of cake compared to world peace nowdays. Keep hoping, keep wishing. Maybe someday we can all learn to live together.

All the best,
Pete

[Nobody's Hero]

Points awarded for reply. Any y2k stories?

[Eugeny Brychkov]

As I know Y2K problem is not applicable to hpux software and hardware. It's applicable to PCs/Intel-compatible-based servers/workstations as some of them had old buggy RTC. For unix systems 'Y2K' will come in 2038 as time counter will expire (running since 1970)
Eugeny

[John Poff]

Hi Robert,

They wanted us to be in here at the stroke of midnight for Y2K, but my boss and me talked them out of it. We patched up everything, went home that evening and partied. We are probably one of the few IT shops that did that, but we convinced management that everything was patched and tested, and that if something did blow up the support from the vendors would be pretty minimal for a couple of days. We even got our mainframe people out of having to be here at midnight.

I doubt I could pull something like that off again. The job market just isn't as strong these days. :)

The closest thing I got to a Y2K scare was when I woke up late on Jan. 1st and my wife came in to tell me that there was huge problems because of Y2K. I just laughed at her becuase I had stayed up till about 2am surfing the web and watching the news sites, and I already knew that everything was ok.

Remember that crazy TV movie that NBC put out right before Y2K? It had the whole world falling apart because of the date problem! As you have noted, the world is a crazier place today than it was three years ago, but Y2K didn't have anything to do with it.

JP

[Steven E. Protter]

December 31, 1999 happened to be a Friday night in December.

During that day, I nervously watched the Internet for signs of trouble, since it was the Federal Holiday for New Years.

At work, every server and PC was turned off Thursday night. We had no trouble with dates, but we had troubles turning stuff on Sunday morning.

As a Sabbath observant Jew, I had to stop nervously watching the Internet at sundown. I did shut down the network in my home, which is now a webhosting business.

Since we don't switch lights on or off after Friday sundown, we went through our normal routine, ate, read religious texts and joked about whether the lights would be on the next day.

Our son, a bit over a year old at the time went to sleep. My wife and I went to bed around 8 p.m. and heard the noise at midnight.

We laid in no special supplies, we did nothing special other than turning off a few computers. As to what we actually did at the stroke of midnight, I'll leave that to your imagination.

Happy New Year ladies, gentlement.

Steve

[Steven E. Protter]

December 31, 1999 happened to be a Friday night in December.

During that day, I nervously watched the Internet for signs of trouble, since it was the Federal Holiday for New Years.

At work, every server and PC was turned off Thursday night. We had no trouble with dates, but we had troubles turning stuff on Sunday morning.

As a Sabbath observant Jew, I had to stop nervously watching the Internet at sundown. I did shut down the network in my home, which is now a webhosting business.

Since we don't switch lights on or off after Friday sundown, we went through our normal routine, ate, read religious texts and joked about whether the lights would be on the next day.

Our son, a bit over a year old at the time went to sleep. My wife and I went to bed around 8 p.m. and heard the noise at midnight.

We laid in no special supplies, we did nothing special other than turning off a few computers. As to what we actually did at the stroke of midnight, I'll leave that to your imagination.

Happy New Year ladies, gentlemen.

Steve

[Simon Hargrave]

We managed a corker on NYE 1999. There had been loads of talk earlier in the year about exorborant millenium payments etc. Then it turned out that most weren't actually getting stupid pay. However at the company I worked at then was a software company, and our customer support guys already promised Y2K support to them over the period. So naturally we had them by the balls and could negotiate what we wanted.

None of the support was overnight, so I still got to get hammered new years eve, but I (and some others) got paid ??500 a day each on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd January just to be on call, during the day only, in case there were any problem came to light in these first critical days.

Easiest grand-and-a-half I ever did earn ;)

[Patrick Wallek]

The company I worked for at the time had everyone come in early on New Year's Eve, and shut down ALL applications on ALL machines, and just had the OS running on everything. We had convinced management that we didn't need to completely shut down the machines, and if we actually powered them off we could really have problems with hardware when we powered them back on.

The company also paid for a hotel room in the hotel adjacent to the office building for New Year's Eve night. So, then on New Year's Day all of us Sys Admins and applications folks were there bringing all the applications back up and testing them to make sure everything was OK, which it was. I think there might have been a couple of minor problems, but definitely nothing major.

[harry d brown jr]

I remember being sober - very unusual :-o and do you think I could find a roadblock ? Nay!

I remember laughing at my naive sister who thought the world was going to come to an end, so she stockpiled food and water. Of course I pointed out to her that if the world came to an end what good would food and water be? Eventually her and her family ate the stockpiled food :-)

THe only COMPUTER issues we had at work was with M$ machines. Those left running were fine, and most of those powered off were fine, but a few had date issues when being booted up.

I was hoping the IRS would have a major melt down - I guess I didn't pray enough!

live free or die
harry

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

I was handling a star hotel support in New delhi and at that time the Hotel Authorites gave us a free pass to the New Years Concert , and a luxurious room at no cost . Guess what was I doing at 12:00 'o' clock . I was drunk and dancing .



Manoj Srivastava

[Pete Randall]

First, a question for Steve Protter:

Steve, are you sure that "December 31, 1999 happened to be a Friday night in December."? I could have sworn it was in November - or was that January.

We did nothing out of the ordinary on New Year's Eve. The systems, even the M$ ones, stayed up throughout - with no problems and we enjoyed a nice quiet New Year's Day at home.

We had done a dry run beforehand to test things out and the worst part was watching my DBA tearing his hair out trying to undo all the test transactions. He was scared to death to restore the whole database so instead spent several painful hours learning the intricacies of our application systems.

Pete

[John Bolene]

I even still have one system running 9.04 and I have yet to see any noticeable Y2K problems.

I have seen copyright notices out of date, but no other issues.

Why was this such a non event?

It was a bigger deal on the UNISYS mainframe, but that was mainly a programmer issue not an OS problem. They only included a 2 digit year and had to change to all 4 digits.

[Martin Johnson]

We run 2 disaster recovery tests a year at SunGard. Back in 96, after successfully recovering our apps, we decided to change the date to 01/01/2000. Almost none of our apps worked! $60+ millon and 3 and a half years later, everything went smoothly. The only problem I experienced was a Lotus 123 spreedsheet which displayed the date as 01/01/100.

Marty

[Sorrel G. Jakins]

I planned to test management's heart health by switching off the lights at midnight. Unfortunately, I confided in a blabbermouth colleague so at ten til y2k a policeman handcuffed me to the hat rack until ten after.
Incarceration without trial is against the Geneva Convention, no?

[Chris Vail]

Y2k was the biggest non-event of my life. The company I was working for wanted me in the data center at midnight, so they rented a nice suite at a nearby hotel. I had already applied all the OS patches, and any application issues weren't my problem. The day before, I verified that all systems (Sun, IBM, H/P, SCO) had all current patches (I had been patching all year, but WTH?). Everything was current. Nothing happened--as planned.

I was there in the datacenter with the NT admin and the Web master, and we played hearts until we decided that we had earned our paychecks, then we each went back to the hotel. The fireworks shows were still going on, so we went out to the balcony and watched. The most memorable thing was the fireworks.

[John Payne_2]

I can vouch for Sorrel, I was there too. I am not sure who decided that the University police had to be there. I was on wages then. I made full extra paycheck in overtime due to y2k. It was great, it's not like we did anything.

The only problem we had with y2k was that a Sun machine decided to have a root disk fail. 2 guys worked on it for like 6 hours.

John

[John Collier]

New years eve 99??? Hmmmm. Let me think. Forgive me folks, but I've slept since then.

Seriously, I was one of the fortunate (or unfortunate, however you want to look at it) ones that wasn't considered 'essential' at that point in my career. I thought I had it made because I didn't have to be at the office and I could go out and celebrate the New Year with my wife. Little did I know that my lovely wife would hound me worse than my boss ever would have.

We went downtown for the celebrations and we weren't there for 20 minutes before she started getting paranoid about the electric company, the water company, the telephone company, the PC's at the house (which I left on, much to her dismay (hey, I had confidence even if she didn't!)), etc...

Before the whole thing was done and over with, I was wishing that I would have been at the office just so I could have relaxed and enjoyed myself!!

It may have been a non-event in the computer industry, but it certainly wasn???t with my wife. Who would have figured?

[David Burgess]

Ah 2038. I'll be retired by then so it'll be a peaceful night for me that night!

I remember y2k. After plenty of testing and patching we just switched them off and came back in on the 2nd of January and powered them up.
It's damn hard to type with crossed fingers!!

I heard we had a problem this new year and to my disbelief someone asked if it was a year 2003 bug!

Still while I'm being paid to answer out of hours questions I'll keep answering them!

Ching ching!

Regards,

Dave.

[John Dvorchak]

I was one of the few in our IT department of about 45, that wasn't worried. I couldn't see how trucks would stop, power companies would fail etc. I also play drums in a Rock and Blues band and we had a gig News Years eve. Just before we left the office I was informed, by our boss, that we would all have to be back at work at the crack of dawn. He thought I was joking when I said, I'll be late and drunk.

Well sure enough I was late and at least a little drunk but mostly tired. I remember having to check the dates on about 40 NT systems, a couple of times, because I kept falling asleep before the job could finish and would scroll off the screen.

As predicted, nothing quit running, dogs didn't start sleeping with cats and world didn't end. Oh yeah, I was still there at noon after everyone else had left...sleeping in my cube.

[Carla Breuer]

I remember Y2K very well. Our IT department had to work. NO OT! Even though the system had been tested several times with many future dates with no problems. We had to come into work that evening @11:00 and wait until the event occurred! It was the most boring of all New Year's eves!!! I have enjoyed all 3 new years to the fullest since. I think I'm still hungover from this one!

HAPPY 2003 EVERYBODY!

Carla