Back To The Future (Y2K Fun)

[keech@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

Paul said:
>We've been doing some Y2K testing on a 3rd machine, carefully disabling
>pass-thru to the test machine as long as the test machine has gone 'back to
>the future.'
>
>IBM recommends not doing any network stuff while the date on the test
>machine is advanced.
>
>And yet... we've gotten hints that there should be no reason to prevent
>users from using display station pass through to access the test machine.
>
>Has anyone encountered this testing scenario, and has anyone connected to
>the future from their live network?
>
>In the meantime, we're implementing a dial-in scenario, but it's not the
>solution we'd like.
>
>---Paul E Musselman
>PaulMmn@ix.netcom.com

Paul,
The reason IBM recommends not doing any network stuff while the date
on the test machine is advanced is because you don't want any year 2000
dates leaking prematurely onto your production machines.  You want to
test (and fix) your applications in isolation, making sure they all
can handle year 2000 dates, before propagating those dates throughout
the databases on your network.

Unfortunately, the IBM web page has sort of implied that there is some
problem with SNA itself when some nodes are at year 2000, and this
is *not* true.  From an SNA functional standpoint, there is absolutely
no problem with running some nodes pre-2000 and some nodes post-2000.

For example, passthrough will work perfectly fine from a 1998 box to a
2000 box.  But, let me ask you this:  While that passthrough session
is active, can you absolutely guarantee that no user on the 1998
system will open a remote DDM file on the 2000 system, using the
display passthrough connection, and retrieve some of the year-2000
data from your test machine, copying it to the 1998 machine?
And, if that happens, will all your applications correctly
handle that year 2000 data?

I hope you can see the rationale for the caution, and can decide what
is best for your testing efforts.

Perhaps, if you really want to use passthrough to the y2k box, you can
define a new mode that has maximum sessions and maximum conversations
set to 1.  That way your passthrough can use that mode, and no other
conversations can start on the same device.

Good luck,
Marty Keech  IBM AS/400 APPC, Payment Server, 'n Stuff
+---
| This is the Midrange System Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---