Silly season

Thu Dec 23 08:47:31 UTC 1999

> Cc: nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: Re: Silly season
> 
> 
> On Wed, Dec 22, 1999 at 01:55:17PM -0900, Aaron Dewell wrote:
> > 
> > Or February 6, 2106 at 6:28:14 if your UNIX system keeps an unsigned 32-bit
> > time_t.  I Y2.038k tested my Solaris 7 box, it kept time past 3:14 AM 1/19/38,
Folks, time_t is _SIGNET LONG_, not unsigned one. And y2.038k is really a
problem, and can touch some real-time systems (Y2K can not, except some
absolutelky crazy ones).

> > but the date command would not set it.  Which implies that the kernel itself is
> > unsigned, while the date command uses a signed number.
> 
> Wasting an entire 2 billion seconds to check for a -1 error condition
> instead of the one's complement 0xFFFFFFFF is remarkably stupid imho. But
> it would break a lot of userland programs to change. As far as I know in
> BSD it is still a signed long, at least in machine/ansi.h.
> 
> -- 
> Richard A. Steenbergen <ras at above.net>  http://users.quadrunner.com/humble
> PGP Key ID: 0x60AB0AD1  (E5 35 10 1D DE 7D 8C A7  09 1C 80 8B AF B9 77 BB)
> AboveNet Communications - AboveSecure Network Security Engineer, Vienna VA
> "A mind is like a parachute, it works best when open."   -- Unknown
> 
> 

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