STL Time Machine Report #26 - Monday 10 August 1998 (1998-08-10) More on the "Summer of Upgrades" Last Saturday night/Sunday morning the mainframe upgrade was successfully completed. Later this month we upgrade from solid-state disk to newer fast-cached RAID disk. We still have some CICS regions to upgrade from Release 3.3 to 4.1 scheduled for later this month. It looks like we will be upgrading the mainframe from MVS/ESA 5.2.2 to OS/390 Release 2.5 this September. They may be a bit of a brouhaha because Tech Services wants to install LE/MVS as the default runtime, and that will break everything that uses the third party Database. Apparently, tech services believes that since the beta has been running okay in the Y2K test facility, that somehow the Database people have magically upgraded all the production applications that use it. That still seems likely to be delayed until first quarter 1999. Disassembler News Thanks to Thierry Falissard, I was able to get a copy of the NASPA system 370 disassembler. I assembled it with no problems and tried it out. It sure would have saved me a lot of time three weeks ago. I e-mailed a copy of it to the guy in TechServices who was trying to get the HLASM disassembler. He emailed me back to tell me he finally had the HLASM disassembler up & running, and included a JCL sample. So I tried it out. The disassembler for HLASM comes in a separate purchase toolkit from IBM. It is obviously derived from the NASPA disassembler, but it works better. Looks like I won't have the fun of writing my own. I did write a tiny S/370 disassembler for DOS. You type in two to six bytes of hex code and get back the S/370 instruction. Miscellaneous The St. Louis Y2K'ers got together a couple of weeks ago and watched Cory on the 700 Club tape. Eric Buckley said he hasn't seen rates go up dramatically in the St. Louis area. There is still a shortage of geeks, though, even with the recent closure of Venture stores, which put about 200 programmers out of work. I'm guessing that St. Louis companies are paying $50-60 an hour for contract COBOL & CICS programmers, but it's difficult to find them. Awareness seems to rising dramatically. I was watching a local access cable channel to get election results (I was unopposed in my primary, so I won). A small-town mayor was being asked for political analysis of primary results, and the reporter asked if his town would have their Year 2000 problem fixed! He said he hoped so, and the other reporter said their station had Y2K problems. Paul Milne posted another URL for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on Mercantile Bank and Y2K: http://www.jrnl.com/news/98/Aug/jrn83060898.html This one didn't include the photos and the Bank rating table, either. I don't agree with Paul Milne's interpretation of the article, but it states that Mercantile bank started their time machine testing last July 1st. Interestingly enough, the table indicated that NationsBank merged with Bank of America to get help with their Y2K efforts. According to what I read in c.s.y2k, NationsBank was far ahead of Bank of America in Y2K readiness. So who's right? Windows 98 Date Bug??? If you didn't check out Chris Anderson's links, here's one about Windows 98: AREA: Article TITLE: Millennium test exposes date fault in Windows 98 URL: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/98/08/09/stibusnws01022.html?1733620 ===begin quote=== The Sunday Times: Business: August 9 1998 Millennium test exposes date fault in Windows 98 David Parsley PURCHASERS of Microsoft's new Windows 98 personal computer operating system could face havoc as a result of a bug that causes it to malfunction when the year changes. It is unrelated to the millennium bug although software designed to spot millennium-bug problems first exposed the problem. Microsoft has been aware of the date-related problem since the launch of Windows 98 in June. It has failed to notify purchasers of the product, which replaces Windows 95, but it is now moving to tackle the issue and has teamed up with Prove It 2000, a British software house. Richard Coppel, chief executive of Prove It 2000, confirmed that the problem was not related to the millennium bug. He said: "There is an anomaly with Windows 98 that affects the date on the system. We have tested the program by setting the date at just 30 seconds before December 31. The year does not matter, which is why it is not a millennium problem. It can be any year in any century. When the clocks tick past midnight into the next year we have found the program either leaps two days forward or one day back." Such a problem could cause computers to perform tasks at incorrect times. This would have potentially damaging consequences in financial institutions, which programme transactions such as money transfers months in advance. While Microsoft's British subsidiary confirmed that a date problem with Windows 98 did exist, its American parent would not comment. It is not the first problem the group has had with the package but unless it is remedied, it could be the most damaging. Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, is involved in a legal battle with the American government as a result of the Windows 98 launch. It has accused him of trying to crush rivals and monopolise access to the Internet by incorporating a web browser in the package. ===end of quote=== If this is true, and I emphasize IF, then it would demolish the notion that Bill Gates will save us. Or else he really needs the revenue from those NT 5.0 licenses before 1999. Perhaps the price of a Pacific island paradise is going up? I don't have Windows 98, so I can't test for this. Is there anyone out there brave/foolhardy enough to test their Win98 system for this problem? Please don't forget to back up your critical files before booting up with a forward date. As of 1998-07-28, My countdown now reads: 83 days until 1998-11-01 (Beta Test begins) 144 days until 1999-01-01 (External Testing begins) 509 days until 2000-01-01 (Rollover) Previous Year 2000 Time Machine Reports are available at: http://home.att.net/~arnold.trembley/tmr.htm STANDARD DISCLAIMER: I am NOT an official corporate spokesperson. My opinions should not be held against my benevolent employer. -- Arnold Trembley http://home.att.net/~arnold.trembley/ "Y2K? Because Centuries Happen!"