The highest levels of OpenVMS management have confirmed that the Year
2000 effort commands a high priority. Engineering work has centered
around the activities of investigation, testing, documentation,
and solutions
Investigation
The entire OpenVMS engineering group was involved in conducting an investigation of the
OpenVMS product code to evaluate its Year 2000 readiness. First, we created an inventory
of all OpenVMS products (including their modules and components) that should be addressed
by our due diligence effort. Subsequently, all product sources were analyzed by OpenVMS
engineers in a fashion equivalent to a line-by-line inspection.
To ensure that OpenVMS investigations were conducted at the same level of
thoroughness, all engineers received guidelines that precisely and formally
identified all aspects of the investigation, including the following:
- Methodology
- Criteria for due diligence
- Problem reporting and documentation
- Tools to aid the investigation and reporting of data
Testing
Testing plays an important and prominent role in our Year 2000 effort. Regression
test suites have been used to simulate the transition to the year 2000 and beyond
and to validate product modifications and enhancements. Among others, we have
found the following transition dates interesting to test:
- September 9, 1999 to September 10, 1999 (to confirm correct translation of 9/9/99)
- December 31, 1998 to January 1, 1999 (to check whether 99 is used to mean "no expiration date")
- December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000 (to check century transition; January 1 should be a Saturday)
- February 28, 2000 to February 29, 2000 (to verify leap year calculation)
- February 29, 2000 to March 1, 2000 (to verify leap year calculation; March 1 should be a Wednesday)
OpenVMS Engineering and several OpenVMS customers have run simulations of the
year 2000 and no problems have ever been found. Regression test suites have been
run on OpenVMS VAX and Alpha Version 7.1, OpenVMS VAX Version 6.2, OpenVMS Alpha
Version 6.2-1H3, VMS Version 5.5-2, and VMS Version 5.5-2H4.
In addition to the regression test suites, we have also run other tests, including
load testing, cluster tests, the User Environment Test Package (UETP), and ad hoc tests
of DECwindows Motif, the Backup utility, the job controller, and the file system
exerciser. Test clusters have contained a combination of both DECnet-Plus and DECnet
for OpenVMS (Phase IV) nodes.
Based on our tests and investigations, applications that consistently use the
4-digit year representations that OpenVMS produces or accepts as input will not be
affected by the transition to the year 2000.
Since OpenVMS is one of the few operating systems that allows users to advance system clocks to times
in the future, you can also conduct simulations to test your own software now for potential year
2000 problems.
Documentation
We are providing customers with comprehensive documentation of our investigation results, including
a list of any year 2000-related limitations identified by the investigation. This information
is posted on the Web and is also included in the release notes that ship with the Year 2000 kits.
Solutions
Because the few restrictions we found are so minor and limited in scope, we decided to
release Year 2000 enhancement kits rather than new versions of our products. These kits are
available through the normal service channels and over the Web from the Software Patch (ECO)
Access page. Kits are available for the following versions of OpenVMS:
- OpenVMS Version 7.1 and 7.1-1H1
- OpenVMS Version 6.2 and 6.2-1H3
- OpenVMS Version 5.5-2 and 5.5-2H4
We strongly recommend that customers upgrade their environments
to our Year 2000-ready releases before the year 2000.
Future Products' Readiness for Year 2000
Another goal of the OpenVMS Year 2000 Initiative was to incorporate checkpoints and other
verification steps into existing engineering and maintenance quality processes during 1997
to ensure that no new year 2000-related problems would be introduced in new and updated
software products.
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