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New Year 1998
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Mentor O/E sites face operating system upgrades to become Year 2000 compliant.
NCR SVR4 MP-RAS versions prior to Release 3.02 are not Year 2000 compliant. Systems using NCR SVR4 MP-RAS must upgrade the Operating System to Release 3.02 to become compliant with Year 2000. NCR published a paper, “Y2K Product Information Pak,” which is available on their Website. This paper reviews the Year 2000 issue as it relates to NCR servers running MP-RAS, specifically their System 3000 Servers. Under “Statement of Qualification,” NCR states:
“There are several issues related to servers and the Year 2000. For NCR, these issues involve the machine firmware (BIOS) and the Operating System. All NCR System 3000 Servers, with the exception of the 3320 and 3340, have BIOS upgrades available to attain Year 2000 Qualification. NCR UNIX SVR4 MP-RAS will be Year 2000 Qualified with release 3.02.”
Further, NCR states under “Qualification Plans” that:
“The NCR 3320 and 3340 servers will not have a firmware update available to attain Year 2000 Qualification. The customer and the NCR Sales Team should work together to create a migration plan for replacement of these servers prior to the Year 2000.
System 3000 Servers, with the exception of the 3320 and 3340, which have been upgraded to the appropriate level of firmware running NCR SVR4 MP-RAS release 3.02 and above, or Microsoft Windows NT release 4.0 and above, will be qualified for the Year 2000. BIOS upgrades are available to bring the machine firmware into Year 2000 Qualification.
The NCR S26, S40, and 4300 Servers were Year 2000 Qualified from initial shipments. No BIOS upgrade is necessary for the S26, S40, or 4300. BIOS upgrades, if necessary, are available from the NCR Midrange Systems Global Support Center.”
For those servers where a BIOS upgrade is available, the server will be required to have a minimum 32MB memory. Also, users upgrading from MP-RAS versions prior to 3.0x will be required to upgrade to MP-RAS release 3.0x prior to upgrading to MP-RAS release 3.02.
At GA, we ran initial tests to determine the Year 2000 compliance level of Mentor O/E. From our tests we determined Mentor O/E makes a “C” call to the O/S to obtain the date which is used internally by M O/E. Everything worked successfully for Year 2000 and beyond, indicating that the M O/E internals function properly for Year 2000, provided the Operating System returns a proper date value. Although our initial tests indicate that Mentor O/E is Year 2000 compliant internally, we are in the process of running extensive certification tests with NCR UNIX SVR4 MP-RAS 3.02. Once these tests are completed, the results will be available on GA’s Year 2000 website.
Users should be advised that the Year 2000 issue involves much more than the system hardware, Operating System and Database Operating Environment. User application programs, and interfaces to other Operating System functions as well as other systems are also involved. Every aspect of the system must be Year 2000 compliant for their system to be Year 2000 Qualified.
In the MultiValue world, we are spared some of the anguish other computer users are experiencing. The Pick database engine, which all our systems are based on, has built-in Year 2000 compliance. Our dates are stored internally as integers. As long as we store dates in internal date format, the dates are Year 2000 compliant. Further, data entry uses an inferencing scheme based on “30”. Any two-digit year value entered into the system is interpreted to be in century 1900 if the value is 30 or greater, and century 2000 if the value is less than 30.
We are not protected, however, from the programmer who tries to get “really tricky” with the program. Two-digit dates embedded in keys, or stored as alphanumeric text are not Year 2000 compliant. This is especially bad where those values are used to sort data or to perform range calculations, such as in aging and actuarial computations. Therefore, users are advised to check their systems thoroughly for Year 2000 compliance.
If you have questions regarding this information or desire assistance with Year 2000 compliance testing, please contact David Peters at GA on (01908) 690695. Alternatively, e-mail dpeters@genauto.com or visit the General Automation website at http://www.genauto.com.
Last Updated: 09 November 1998