[Info-vax] Software does wear out, was: Re: Raid Controller in I64 ans Alpha(MSA$UTIL)

[Paul Sture]

Paul Hardy wrote:

> Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>> All of these are examples of software which worked just fine and then fell
>> over (or will fall over) due to various external factors or limits
>> triggering software issues.
>
> I remember some VMS software that worked well for years, then fell over in
> the 1980s when the number of days since the epoch (1 Jan 1900?) used by the
> ICL 1900 mainframe that wrote the tapes we were reading overflowed 16 bits.
>
> Ironically, if the programmer had ignored the situation, then it would have
> printed a silly date, but survived. Instead he wrote code that was supposed
> to handle the situation, but never having been tested, fell over
> spectacularly and crashed the whole program!
>
> VMS time may be well thought out and robust, but I bet lots of VMS (and
> Unix) programs will fall over at  03:14:07 UTC 2038-01-19.

I have a gut feeling stuff will fall over before then.

For example my Windows 8.1 virtual client went bonkers at a point
shortly after the clocks last changed and I ended up rebooting it*.  If
that had been feeding data to any other system, who knows what would
have happened...

* that may or may not have been due to the fact that the virtual machine
was set to synchronize with the time on the host machine.  It wasn't
important for me, but that sort of thing could be critical in a
production environment.

-- 
Paul Sture