ENTERPRISE COMPUTING | Beat the Clock
| Beat the Clock Will e-mails fall through the Net? In spite of some incorrectly dated transmissions, the Internet will not collapse after midnight on Dec. 31. The Internet Engineering Task Force has studied the matter and concluded, after a systematic review of protocols, that the Net will survive the century rollover.
| Beat the Clock Will e-mails fall through the Net? In spite of some incorrectly dated The Internet Engineering Task Force has studied the matter and concluded, after a The task forces Year 2000 Working Group inventoried hundreds of Internet The Network News Protocol and UseNet News Message Format are problematic, however, Minor date problems. The investigators flagged all protocols that make any reference to The Year 2000 Working Group has notified the HTTP and HTML working groups and has But IETF investigators mainly found reasons not to worry about an Internet collapse. Potential missorts. All current e-mail standards require four-digit years and are not The epochal year for the Internet is not 2000 but 2038. On Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2038, many Florence Olsen
transmissions, the Internet will not collapse after midnight on Dec. 31.
systematic review of protocols, that the Net will survive the century rollover.
protocols documented in the IETF Request for Comment Series and gave most of them a clean
bill of health. Only a few older implementations that use two-digit years turned up in the
working draft of the investigative results.
because they specify a two-digit year format. IETF has formed a group to update those
protocols.
Universal Coordinated Time and UCTTimeSyntax, which permit either two- or four-digit year
representations. These ambiguous formats appear in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol 1.1 and
Hypertext Markup Language 2.0.
recommended making the four-digit year format mandatory in revised versions of the two RFC
specifications. The group believes about one-fifth of current HTTP traffic on the Internet
is coming from servers that send in the obsolete two-digit year format.
The Boot Protocol and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol are clean, they said. Nor do any
serious problems affect the directory services protocolsWhois, Rwhois, Whois++ and
the Lightweight Directory Access Protocolalthough some of them permit optional
two-year date representations.
vulnerable to 2000 failures. Very old mail systems still using two-digit years in their
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol headers are not likely to shut down, but their message
stores and user agents might missort the mail. Messages stored on obsolete Internet
Messaging Access Protocol 2.0 servers or clients could be missorted or prematurely
deleted. But the working group found IMAP 4.0, which has no year 2000 issues, to be nearly
ubiquitous.
Internet protocols would find their time-stamp counters rolling over to zero if the IETF
were not making revisions now.
Internet: folsen@gcn.com