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Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

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Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#271

Post by skissane »

dwheeler wrote: post #30

Yes, the y2k crisis was real, or more accurately, would have been a serious crisis if people had not rushed and spent lots of money to deal with it ahead of time. In many systems it would have been no big deal if unfixed, but there were a huge number of really important systems that would have been a serious problem had they not been fixed. Part of the challenge was that this was an immovable deadline, often if thing…

From what I've heard, a number of IT departments used it as justification to dump legacy systems.

For example, at a former employer of mine, a big justification for getting rid of the IBM-compatible mainframe and a lot of legacy systems which ran on it (various in-house apps written in COBOL and FORTRAN) was Y2K.

In reality, they probably could have updated the mainframe systems to be Y2K-compliant. But, they didn't want to do that. They wanted to dump it all and replace it with an off-the-shelf solution running on Unix and/or Windows. And, for reasons which have absolutely nothing to do with Y2K itself (the expense and limitations of the mainframe platform), it probably was the right call. But, Y2K helped moved it from "wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-we" column into the "must-be-done" column.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#273

Post by exikyut »

mgkimsal wrote: post #43
wefarrell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It a shame that we as engineers can't just say "this maintenance is required to fix this known issue. It's not a huge deal but will cause trouble if it's not dealt with". Instead we have to be all doom and gloom and tell management that the company/world will end.

Colleague was just dealing with a clients of their who was still using TLS1.0. They're running classic ASP on Window Server 2008, and can't (effectively) migrate. Colleague had been raising the alarm for months (since they started on the project) that "this is going to mean all your systems will stop working in early 2020" but no one seemed to care or understand. They did, last week, put in ... haproxy as an SSL term…

> How do you message this effectively?

Assuming the entire org is using a captive proxy with an installed CA, identify/isolate every upper-level management person's system(s) in some way, and reroute their access to all internal applications through a deliberately horribly misconfigured HTTPS reverse proxy running TLS 1.0. Their modern browser will explode.

"AAAA, sorry, that thing we've been telling you about for months hit us earlier than we thought it would but thankfully it's only hit all the internal stuff"

"Wait so this is what all of our customers will see?"

"Yes, all of them. Nobody will be to reach us, none of our APIs will work, and we will also break our SLAs on every single contract."

---

You probably want to use GPO to disable bypassing the security warning prompt, and/or set up HSTS for your domains beforehand.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#274

Post by kccqzy »

protomyth wrote: post #149
andyjpb wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A much more insidious problem with the Y2K bug was the leap year calculation. As you point out, the 20-digit-year thing was relatively easy to fix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#Leap_years

I still love the fact that if you only implemented the first rule or had the knowledge to implement all 3 rules, it would totally work, but if you implemented 2 of the 3 rules you were wrong. It taught me a great lesson about results not proving correctness as how you got there could bite you later.

I don't get why people don't know all three rules. In elementary school when the calendar is taught, the complete rules of the leap year were simply taught by the teacher. We even joked about people born on the 29th of February. Why wasn't this taught everywhere?

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#275

Post by setpatchaddress »

codeisawesome wrote: post #263
TomVDB wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good friend of mine was (and still is) a civil/construction engineer. Other than some introduction courses in college, he had never done any programming before. But after losing his job in 1998, he was hired by a major European consulting company to work on the Y2K problem. With an auditorium full of others who had barely any programming experience, he was given a crash course in Cobol for a month, and then he had…

I’m wondering what happened to the people in meeting rooms who suggested that this could be automated if it needed no deep understanding of the COBOL language or the banking domain..? EDIT (for clarity): that’s what I would say, and I’m pretty sure many people smarter than I had said it - so I’m just curious what objections made business push forward with the “relatively unskilled” human labour intensive practices in…

I'm not a COBOL expert, but I suspect you misunderstand both the difficulty of teaching a machine to understand the problem well enough to automate fixes for it and the available computing resources at the time. This was still the era of Windows 95, the classic Mac, and expensive workstations.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#277

Post by rabboRubble »

Old Y2K project manager here. We had a multiyear project, found issues, fixed, and deployed fixes. Both hardware and software issues. I faced off against internal business, external clients, internal audit, internal compliance, and external regulators. We had IIRC nine potential failure dates including 2000-Feb-29. My ultimate project documentation required twenty 5 inch binders and a hand cart to deliver the package to our local CEO for sign off. Pretty sure he didn't read anything and simply just signed the cover page. We rocked the project, I passed all aggressive audits and earned myself a nice bonus that year for having a successful Y2k rollover.

Then came 2000-Feb-29 and it happened, I had a risk management system hosted out of the UK that just didn't work. Had to file the system failure through to internal global management and domestic regulators.

I was thrilled. First because that system owner had refused to conduct global integrated testing so I could blame the SO. Had the request, negotiation, and finally the outright refusal in writing. The failed system was relatively trivial domestically. Risk wasn't calculated one day on a global platform that and that risk didn't hit my local books. Ha ha sucks to be you. Most importantly, I was thrilled because I could point to the failure and say "see, that is what would have happened x100 if we hadn't nailed the project." It was a great example for all the assholes who bitched about the amount of money we spent.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#278

Post by mattsears »

Yes, it was real. While in college, I was working as a programmer (Perl mostly) for a book publishing company and several database systems wouldn't boot up after the new year. It turned out they didn't bother upgrading their software. This was common, but by then, most software companies had patches available - probably because of the hype. In this case, I believe the fear provided by the media actually helped avoid a much bigger crisis.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#279

Post by Smoosh »

codeisawesome wrote: post #263
TomVDB wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good friend of mine was (and still is) a civil/construction engineer. Other than some introduction courses in college, he had never done any programming before. But after losing his job in 1998, he was hired by a major European consulting company to work on the Y2K problem. With an auditorium full of others who had barely any programming experience, he was given a crash course in Cobol for a month, and then he had…

I’m wondering what happened to the people in meeting rooms who suggested that this could be automated if it needed no deep understanding of the COBOL language or the banking domain..? EDIT (for clarity): that’s what I would say, and I’m pretty sure many people smarter than I had said it - so I’m just curious what objections made business push forward with the “relatively unskilled” human labour intensive practices in…

There were tools available, but it was increasing the risk (in a risk-averse atmosphere) to trust them to catch all cases. Try explaining to your superiors why you were given the task of fixing the issue and instead of completely fixing it you saved some money. Probably unacceptable.

Also, much of the remediation could not be automated anyway (for example you may not be able to assume the century is '19' for a given date field which can be in the future. You may need to do a comparison to a cutoff date, or you may only have to enlarge the field knowing that the value is supplied from elsewhere which will itself get fixed), so it fell back to people looking at the code, understanding it just enough, making the required changes, and planning/executing the testing.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#280

Post by f2000 »

Was employed by a large bank in their web division. We fixed many Y2K bugs that would have been triggered. Was on duty New Year's eve and there were a few Y2K bugs that surfaced but nothing show stopping. My anecdotal opinion is that the panic to fix these bugs likely prevented some larger cascading effect/catastrophe. Remember, this was 1999 when testing/QA practices were not always de rigueur. For some shops, Y2K mitigation might have the first time their code base was subjected to any sort of automated tests :-))
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