"The Year 2000 Working
Group(WG) has conducted an investigation into the millennium problem as
it regards Internet related protocols. This investigation only
targeted
the protocols as documented in the Request
For Comments Series (RFCs). This investigation discovered
little
reason for concern with regards to the functionality of the protocols.
A few minor cases of older implementations still using two digit years
(ala RFC
850) were discovered, but almost all Internet protocols were given
a clean bill of health. Several cases of 'period' problems were
discovered,
where a time field would 'roll over' as the size of field was
reached.
In particular, there are several protocols, which have 32 bit, signed
integer
representations of the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 which
will
turn negative at Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 GMT 2038. Areas whose
protocols
will be effected by such problems have been notified so that new
revisions
will remove this limitation." From The
Internet and the Millennium Problem (Year 2000), Philip Nesser II,
January 27, 1999, one of the Current
Internet-Drafts. Dr. Stockton, who wrote an on-line exhaustive
calendrical
summary of Critical
Dates, adds this note in a personal e-mail: "I have earlier pointed
out the error here to PNII - it does not go negative until a whole
second
later."
RFC
2030 - Network Time Protocol "As the NTP timestamp format has been
in use for the last 17 years, it remains a possibility that it will be
in use 40 years from now when the seconds field overflows. As it is
probably
inappropriate to archive NTP timestamps before bit 0 was set in 1968, a
convenient way to extend the useful life of NTP timestamps is the
following
convention: If bit 0 is set, the UTC time is in the range 1968-2036 and
UTC time is reckoned from 0h 0m 0s UTC on 1 January 1900. If bit 0 is
not
set, the time is in the range 2036-2104 and UTC time is reckoned from
6h
28m 16s UTC on 7 February 2036. Note that when calculating the
correspondence,
2000 is not a leap year. [emphasis mine] Note also that leap
seconds
are not counted in the reckoning."
IETF.ORG
- The Internet Engineering Task Force, which plans the future of the
Internet
and seeks to propagate the technologies and tools that keep it running.
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