| Which network products?
Most of our networking products (hubs, switches, repeaters, etc.) do not
contain real-time clocks. They have no notion of the real time. They
only know how much time has elapse since they were powered up or reset.
The power-up time doesn't change in the new millennium. I'd feel comfortable
guaranteeing these products.
Our host-based network management products (HUBwatch, Xvisn) execute under
operating systems which might be affected by the new millennium, so I
wouldn't guarantee anything for these products.
-Shawn
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| While this in no way constitutes an official statement, I would point out that
any product that does not include date functions should be unaffected by the new
millenium. For instance, most (if not all) of the DEChub 90/900 family of
products have no datekeeping capability. All timekeeping is done in system time
ticks from last restart (one tick = 10 ms), with no concern about days and dates.
New millenium concerns generally fall into two areas. 1) Software that keeps
only the last two digits of the year, with an assumed century of 19. This is a
problem in many, many commercial applications, typically database types, since
many data records have been defined with 2-digit year fields. 2) Software that
incorrectly computes the leap year (every fourth year is a leap year, except
centuries, unless the century is divisible by 4; see K&R "The C Programming
Language", 1978, p. 37). Thus, 2000 *is* a leap year. Many people are finding
out that some long lost programmers on their applications were unaware of the
4th century rule (some didn't know the century rule, either). For numerous
discussions and anecdotes on failed systems regarding these problems, see the
RISKS DIGEST newsgroup, comp.risks. Use AltaVista to search the archives.
Any system that does not do datekeeping should not run afoul of the above two
types of problems. One should always beware, however, that some embedded system
uses a clock chip with some type of datekeeping capability and still does some
level of datekeeping internally just to make the hardware work, but does not
show this externally. I do not believe that any of the DEChub 90/900 products
use such a chip.
I believe the greater risk to customers is not in the embedded systems that
comprise their network infrastructures, but in the host systems and applications
(including non-network related software). All their high-quality robust non-stop
networking boxes won't do them any good if the host systems are falling down all
over the place.
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