AIX

Hi,

Experts,

I required your help to change my system date from year 2010 to 2064. The change is required to perform some testing by our dba's and apllication developers. Through smit i am anable to chage the date and received error. I knew that AIX 5.3 TL8 system date is till year 2037
Is their any other trick to change the system date

Regards,

Write a new version of date, and put it in a test directory, change the path statement so that the test directory is ahead of the OS version of date.
The new version of date should call the OS version, and add 54 years to the year.

The date command can be supplanted with your own time command, but the (signed) 32 bit seconds since epoch will still roll sometime in the 2030's.

So any application that asks the kernel for seconds since epoch (using the *standard* functions) will break using a date like 2050.

The difference here, is that one method is a binary the other is an API.

On the other hand, both java and Oracle can handle dates *much* greater or less than the Unix system time. Java uses its own Olsen DB, and can calculate dates accurately for centuries even covering historical time shifts to fix inaccuracies in medieval calendars.

So if you wanted to see how your app will run in 2050, you may have some problems with current Unix implementations of time(). If you want to calculate amatorizations (as an example) to the year 2050, this should be no issue (and not require a call to time()).

Has this Y2K+37 problem been solved in 64 bit versions of Linux?

The problem is that we have been trained to use time(); and its accompanying functions for so long that virtually all code uses it, and expects to see a 32bit signed value in return (return and pass by reference).

As for Linux... I would bet money that time() still returns a 32 bit signed value. As I recall, Linux has at least two timers - but it has been some time since I checked - and I did not investigate deeply.

All Unices now offer higher granularity APIs for time, but time() is the workhorse for the large majority of simple time-stamping or finding out where we are chronologically.

I am 99% sure that AIX keeps its epoch time internally in a 32 bit signed value. The kernel variable "time" and "l_bolt" are both of type time_t which is still a typedef of 32bit signed value.

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The issue here is *why* we are using time(). It is appropriate for timestamps and such... but it is a BAD choice for any type of mathematical function (the example I used was calculating amatorizations (pardon my spellcheck)). If used for an application timestamp is works just peachy right up until 2038. If used as a mathematical calculation of dates it fails on any decently forward looking problem. For this reason (as an example Oracle and Java) development languages / environments can calculate WELL into the future or past.

You probably know about this already:

Year 2038 problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Suggest you approach the manufacturer.