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# The SCO Unix date problem

- To: Support <support@gesn.com>
- Subject: The SCO Unix date problem
- From: Guy Lancaster <glanca@gesn.com>
- Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 12:06:19 -0700
- Cc: Norma <normat@fidlar.com>
- Organization: Global Election Systems Inc.

      Many of our older VTS customers are running SCO UNIX
    System V/386 which has some year 2000 date problems.  It
    seems the biggest culprit is a broken asktime() function
    which is used during boot to get the time from the
    computer's real-time clock.  Here I describe a workaround
    and a patch.

      It seems that the date command does work (on our system at
    least) so the date can be corrected after boot.  This must
    be done as root (the superuser) with no VTS databases
    running (or they may crash).  For example, to set the system
    time to 11:00 a.m. Oct 12, 2000 the date command would be:

    date 1012110000

    You can use "date -?" to display the syntax of the date
    command which is "date [ MMddhhmm[yy]] [ +format ]".  The
    date function is generally used to query the current date
    and time which is what the format spec is for.  Note that
    the year (yy) is 00 for 2000.

      To fix things properly you need the SCO Unix patch.  You
    can find it at
    http://www.sco.com/support/ftplists/xuolist.html under the
    heading "SLS uod426d: Year 2000 SLS".

      It could be worth us preparing and stocking a supply of
    the patch (SLS UOD426D) disks along with a simplified
    version of the installation instructions (Mike? Ian?).  I'm
    going to be trying this out on our SCO UNIX box here
    hopefully sometime this week.

              Guy

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