Silly season

Wed Dec 22 18:58:15 UTC 1999

Hmm, may be, _Let's GOD keep us out of such checkers, and our troubles will be
not more than our problems_ -:)? Just as I predicted - the Y2K danger is in
the
paranoia, not in the Y2K itself...

(I know ISP who did nothing about Y2K. Nothing yet. It results to the short /1 -
2 days/ delay in the January billing, and short /1 - 5 days/ some on-line forms
/statistic etc/ inavailability. And that's all. No one in this ISP will note
just the new year monent. And I believe a lot of other ISP are in the same
situation. Even if you do NOTHING you do not risk to lost service, yoiu risk to
lost billing and some on-line services /ticket reservation, accounting requests,
etc/, not more., Ansient, Cisco Terminal Server issued in the 1990 year is Y2K
compilant - in the terms of functionality; any such box is Y2K compilant. If
some crazy, crazy box is uncompilant at all and stop running in the very moment
of new year /I hardly know how to program such crazy box - you should use Year
as the primary date source/
 it can be easily fixed by installation another (wrong) date into it.

But reading about this testers, watchers etc I really aware of Y2K problem - if
all of this paranoyiks install additional network systems and create additional
traffic, and million of paranoyiks type in WWW requests in the very moment of 
new
year just to check if they are alive yet or already not - they, people, not
soft/hard/ware - could cause real, REAL disaster. -:)

PS. Btw, do you remember the date of 2035 year when UNIX systems can face the
REAL time problem? -:)

On 22 Dec 1999, Sean Donelan wrote:

> Date: 22 Dec 1999 03:52:06 -0800
> From: Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com>
> To: nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: Silly season
> 
> 
> As Alan points out, it looks like silly season will be in full swing.  Here
> is a site claiming it will check the top web sites in the world, and if 5%
> aren't responding at 1 minute before midnight (pick your time zone) a major
> disaster has happened.
> 
> http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/991222/inferno200_1.html
> 
> As has been pointed out before, many sites plan to shutdown their web sites or
> disconnect from the Internet over the New Year's weekend.  Which I guess is
> a self-fulling prediction.  The Internet is still considered an "extra" and
> not a necessary connection like the telephone or ATM.  I haven't heard anyone
> suggesting they would turn off their ATMs, even though they are Y2K ready, just
> to be safe.
> 
> You can read ATM as representing either acronym.
> 
> 
> 
> 

Aleksei Roudnev,
(+1 415) 585-3489 /San Francisco CA/