DCE and the Year 2000

Q: How does DCE handle the "Year 2000" problem?
A: Very well!

Architecturally, and within the reference source code, DCE doesn't use two-digit years. It either uses the Posix time_t datatype, which is valid on a 32-bit machine until the year 2038, or it uses its own utc_t datatype, which is valid until the 40,000AD (more or less).

When entering dates and times, DCE always accepts a four-digit year. There were a few bugs when DCE would output two-digit years (such as in the klist program, integrated from Kerberos), but fixes for those bugs have been made available to all DCE support customers.

(Please note that the above refers only to OSF DCE 1.1 and later releases.) n

Additionally, several vendors have Year 2000 positioning statements for their products offerings:

Gradient Technologies: http//www.gradient.com/Support/y2000.htm

Hewlett-Packard: http//www.software.hp.com/products/Y2K/dce.html

IBM: http://www.software.ibm.com/year2000/index.html

Siemens: http//www.siemens.de/computer/j2000/index.htm

Transarc: http//www.transarc.com/Y2K/index.html