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2038: Only 21 years away

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Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#111

This is (serious) a part of my retirement planning. I'll be mid-50s when this hits, and have enough low level system knowledge to be dangerous. In about 15 years, I'll start spinning up my epochalypse consultancy, and I'm expecting a reasonable return on investment in verifying systems as 2038 compliant.

No one is deploying 32-bit linux now, outside of tiny edge cases and mobile. Mobile devices that go in the trash every 2 years. What do you reasonably expect to be around in 2038 in 32-bit form? Once 64-bit processors became mainstream, the 2038 problem pretty much solved itself. There's only disincentives to building a 32-bit system today let alone in 20+ years. Unlike with Y2k where there was nothing but incentives…

It won't be the same magnitude of issues. However, I'm sure there will be plenty of apps on said 64 bit Linux that have issues. I commented about a mysql problem here that exists on 64 bit MySQL, on 64 bit Linux. It's not much of a stretch that some internal apps at a company would have similar issues.

Edit: Ntp has something of a protocol issue to be addressed as well.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest, but global IPv6 penetration is at ~16%. It rose ~6% last year, so if linear growth is presumed (and it's actually been growing closer to exponentially, as would be expected) we should hit 20% late this year. I'm hopeful that we'll see some decent pickup of it since AWS finally started offering it. This is global adoption; some countries, including the United States, have already hit 20%. [1]: https://www.go…

What's up with that huge weekly variation?

I'm guessing, but could it be offices running IPv6 while employees go home to IPv4? (With non-square edges due to mornings and evenings.)

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#113
This is not a problem for 20 years from now, I've already had to find and fix 2038 bugs ... there was an openssl bug (now fixed) in which cert beginning and ending date math was done in 32-bits ... certs with an end date from a little after 2038 would fail when compared with the current time.

Fortunately for me there was already a fixed OpenSSL already available once I'd found the bug in it.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#115
I Wonder how DRM anti-circumvention laws will mix with this; You have a locked-down device you use, depend on, and know is defective, but you are not allowed to hack the device to fix it.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest, but global IPv6 penetration is at ~16%. It rose ~6% last year, so if linear growth is presumed (and it's actually been growing closer to exponentially, as would be expected) we should hit 20% late this year. I'm hopeful that we'll see some decent pickup of it since AWS finally started offering it. This is global adoption; some countries, including the United States, have already hit 20%. [1]: https://www.go…

What's up with that huge weekly variation?

It looks like it's correlated with the weekend. I guess workplace computers are more likely to use IPv4? It makes sense on the surface. Workplaces have little to no incentive to use IPv6 since they either have a huge block of IPv4 space or run NAT or both. Also they tend to rely more on enterprise network appliances which have bad IPv6 support in my experience. IPv6 is more of a boon to consumer applications since carrier-grade NAT is a nuisance and otherwise you need an IP per customer.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#118

This is (serious) a part of my retirement planning. I'll be mid-50s when this hits, and have enough low level system knowledge to be dangerous. In about 15 years, I'll start spinning up my epochalypse consultancy, and I'm expecting a reasonable return on investment in verifying systems as 2038 compliant.

No one is deploying 32-bit linux now, outside of tiny edge cases and mobile. Mobile devices that go in the trash every 2 years. What do you reasonably expect to be around in 2038 in 32-bit form? Once 64-bit processors became mainstream, the 2038 problem pretty much solved itself. There's only disincentives to building a 32-bit system today let alone in 20+ years. Unlike with Y2k where there was nothing but incentives…

There are, in fact, a lot of 32-bit ARM chips still being deployed today. Yes, arm64 is usable, but using e.g. a Beagleboard- or even Raspberry Pi-class device still often makes sense (for cost or compatibility reasons.)

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#119
post #65
post #5

Is there a reason why they decided to store time as seconds from 1970? In a 32-bit integer nonetheless. It seems like basic logic would have lead the original designers to make it at least 64 bits so that you'd never overflow it (with a 64 bit time we'd be good til the year 292277026596). 64 bits would also allow you to also cover the entirety of history, all the way back to 13.7 billion years ago when the Universe c…

If you told the original UNIX developers that there was even the slightest chance their system might still be in use in 2038, they probably would have called in some large, friendly men in white coats to haul you away. Add to that the fact that memory was very much not cheap at the time. Memory for the PDP-7 (the first computer to run UNIX) cost $12,000-20,000 for 4kB of memory. In 1965 dollars. In 2017 terms, that m…

The year 2038 problem is actually younger than unix.

The first definition was 60th of seconds since 1970-01-01T00:00:00.00 stored in two words (note that a word is 18 bit on a PDP-7!). That definition was later changed.

Also Linus could have defined `time_t` to be 64 bit when he started linux.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time#History

http://aaroncrane.co.uk/2008/02/unix_time/

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#120
post #44

This is (serious) a part of my retirement planning. I'll be mid-50s when this hits, and have enough low level system knowledge to be dangerous. In about 15 years, I'll start spinning up my epochalypse consultancy, and I'm expecting a reasonable return on investment in verifying systems as 2038 compliant.

I hope you've trademarked the term "epochalypse" because it is really catchy! I love it.

I will be just 5 years away from retirement, so I will use this as an opportunity to shore up my 401k.

Of course, the singularity will be here by then and fix it for us just before turning us all into paper clips, yada yada.

I will advertise with the slogan "Epochalypse... NOW."

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