The Real(TM) Y2K Problem

by Brett Taylor

There's certainly been a lot of talk about the Y2K problem and it's only going to increase as the end of the year draws closer. Since I use BSD 100% of the time I haven't worried much about any Y2K problems. While all around me I see people sweating over the coming year, I've sat back and relaxed.

One thing that amazes me is the, at least to me, irrational worries people have. While talking with my mother awhile back she asked me if I thought she should have 50 gallons of water on hand in case the water stops flowing. I'm not sure why water faucets and pumps would stop working just because it's the year 2000, but what do I know? I could understand if the billing process gets screwed up, but I can't see how or why the water would stop flowing from your kitchen faucet.

In any case, all of these worries seem far away from me and until recently I never thought I would have a Y2K problem on my personal computer, especially before the year 2000 gets here! Last week though I found out that even the BSDs aren't immune to Y2K problems.

I'm presently at a university (which will be unnamed for now) in Virginia. I'm a temporary assistant professor, joint in the math and the chemistry and physics departments. I actually have two offices, one in each department. Since I'm a physicist by training and have more work to do there, I spend most of my time in my physics office. I have my own machine there, running FreeBSD and everything is fine.

The math department was kind enough to give me a computer when I arrived. It's a P5-100, with 16 MB of RAM and 1.5 GB of disk. It's slow, but I have FreeBSD on it as well, and it runs fine for the little that I use it there. About a month and a half ago someone from computer services came by and gave me a spiel about how they were checking all the computers on campus for applications which had Y2K problems. He told me about how all they had to do was stick this floppy in, reboot with the floppy and it would do a whole series of checks and then send the results to a server. They would then analyze the results for me and let me know if I had anything they needed to upgrade. At this point I stopped him.

``You know, I'm not running Windows on this computer. I don't think your disk is going to work and I know I don't have any Y2K problems with this OS.''

``You're not running Windows on that machine?''

``Nope, it's running FreeBSD.''

``Free what?''

``FreeBSD - it's sort of like Linux. It's a free Unix operating system.''

At this point he was just staring blankly at me. Holy cow, I thought. He doesn't even recognize the word Linux! He eventually took down my name and office number and I had to assure him that I wouldn't cause trouble if there was a problem with that machine. He then left, going to the next office and I hadn't thought a thing about it since then.

Last week I went over to my math office and scrolling by the screen are a steady stream of hard disk errors. I can't even log in so I reboot and hope for the best (fortunately there's nothing important on that machine). I was a little worried as that was the machine I'd been playing with KDE on for a future article and I figured that if the machine died I wouldn't be getting another one.

After a long fsck on reboot the machine came up and seemed happy again. The next day I come back and it's doing it again! I really figure the machine is gone at this point so I reboot it again and yet again it comes up after a long fsck and again seems happy after the reboot. I never see another hard disk error. I leave fairly confused as with the number of errors I'd seen scrolling by I figured the machine wouldn't even be able to reboot, less yet run happily. I am totally confused.

On the next day I am administering a late test and on my way to check on the student the secretary calls to me.

``Brett, are you locking your computer screen when you leave?''

``No, I just log out when I leave. Why, is there a problem?'' (I'm fairly confused at this point wondering what the problem could possibly be.)

``The computer people have been coming by trying to check your computer and they can't seem to get on.''

It hits me.

``Are they checking for Y2K problems? I already told them I'm not running Windows on that machine.''

``Yes - so you're not running Windows?''

``Nope.''

``Okay - I'll tell them that when they come back.''

Now, I could be wrong. Maybe the hard drive in that machine really is failing, but I've seen no further hard disk errors since that conversation and the machine is running along just fine. But I'm betting that's not the case.

As I understand the diagnostic tool they had on floppy was supposed to be placed in the computer, the computer rebooted and then it would run its little diagnostic. Looking through /var/log/messages I see a lot of strange reboots - reboots that happened while I wasn't there, hard reboots when no one was logged on (and I'm the sole user of that machine). I can't believe they are all power outages (one was). It sure looks like someone has rebooted the machine a number of times and it sure wasn't me!

It appears I've experienced my first Y2K problem. I haven't seen any warnings about this problem - well-meaning computer services people attempting to Y2K proof your computer by trying to use a DOS floppy to read your BSD-filled hard disk. It's almost funny! Okay it's really funny. I wish I could have watched them working!

I'll end this editorial with a small Y2K warning: for all of you out there in the real world, watch out for this particular problem! In case I'm just plain wrong about this and the hard drive really does fail, I'll apologize in advance to the computer services people and I'll be sure to let you the readers know if the hard drive actually does fail anytime soon. Until then I'll see you in the new year as Chris gets the last editorial of 1999!