Y2K was an interesting time with the prophets of doom out in full force. And yes while there were some issues, it wasn’t quite the end of the world as we knew it. 2010 however came up on us very quietly from a date problem p.o.v. but there have been some fairly major issues worldwide and not much has been heard about it.
There have been problems with Cisco CSM modules, Juniper’s router OS and Symantec’s End Point Protection.
Germany likely experienced the greatest date-related problem because software in a security microchip used in 30 million German bank cards was unable to recognize the date 2010. Hmmm, I wouldn’t be happy if I couldn’t use my bank card …
In Australia, point-of-sales machines skipped ahead to 2016 rather than 2010 at midnight Dec. 31, rendering them unusable by retailers, some of whom reported thousands of dollars in lost sales.
Palm resolved a 2010 issue Jan. 1 when many of its users reported that their Palm Pre phones wouldn’t sync and their calendar applications wouldn’t work at all. Palm issued an OS version 1.3.5.1 that fixes the problem.
Another wide ranging problem was a bug in one of the rules of the ubiquitous anti-spam solution SpamAssassin. A fix was quickly forthcoming and for those using sa_update, this would have been applied automatically. However, the daemon still needed to be restarted.
Also of concern to businesses, SAP found a 2010 issue with the date that is used to help identify individual spool requests. Left unpatched, SAP software enters the data 2100, which effectively leaves active all requests made since 2010 started.
