Re: Year 2000 Crash

James W. Kilgore wrote:
> 
> Dave Mahadevan wrote:
> 
> > The Senate Banking Committee is even worried that vertiginous computers
> > might automatically erase the last 99 years' worth of bank records.
> > Some Y2K consultants are advising consumers to make sure they dont enter
> > the 1999 holday without obtaining hard-copy evidence of their assets.
> >
> We don't even have to wait that long.  Three weeks ago, one of our
> clients had a power outage (Thanks for the warning Puget Power) and
> their system came back up with a couple of fried cards (Thanks Best
> Fortress) and a system date of 11/22/28.
> 
> It took a couple of days before their system operator called me about
> some wierd stuff going on and after putting her under the hot lights to
> get the full story it dawned on me the system came back with 11/22/2028!
> and a whole lot of stuff reached it's expiration date. Not to mention
> that the next scheduled back up was to occur on 11/23/2028.
> 
> Is it just me or does Nov 22nd mean anything?

I believe 11/22/28 was the default date stored in the internal hardware
clock on the 400.  Of course, with recent support for Year 2000 added
you ended up with the wonderful side benefit of it being interpreted as
2028 instead of 1928.  
As for why 11/22/28 - something to do with how the date is stored
internally - I forget the details.

You could also run across this problem if certain hardware on the AS/400
was replaced (the control panel I believe).  The next IPL would take
this default date and your system would come up as 11/22/28.
I ran across this myself once a few years ago.
They issued PTF's that would blank out this default date in this case
and force the operator to enter a date/time during IPL.

I know the V2R3 PTF was SF15305.
I believe in V3R0M5 & V3R1M0 there were instances where the date would
default to 95/01/01, and there were PTF's issued for this, for V3R0M5
the current PTF is MF09401 and for V3R1M0 it is MF09265. 
Original PTF was MF08828 for V3R0M5 and MF08829 for V3R1M0 and you will
probably need to see the cover letter for those for details instead of
the above superseding PTFs.

Haven't seen any PTF's for later releases.  Maybe the problem has been
fixed in the base code for V3R2 + ?
Although I suspect it is still a problem with the RISC models.
APAR MA15728 shows they know there's a problem, but there appears to be
no solution at the moment.

Jim - do you know what release this customer was running ?

-- 
... Neil Palmer                                      AS/400~~~~~      
... NxTrend Technology -Canada       ____________          ___  ~     
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