Year 2000 issues with Zeus Bulletin Board Software
Zeus BBS v1.1 contained many obvious problems that will surface when
used after the year 1999. Many of the problems were related to
reading two character dates from an external source. All immediate
problems related to the year 2000 have been fixed for Zeus 1.2.
These included:
The mail subsystem
Many mail protocols and programs represent years in two digits when
they are in human readable ASCII: the FidoNet standard message header
for example. Whenever Zeus encounters a date where the year is less
than "80", it will treat that year as being in the 21st century:
"2080". If it is between "81" and "99", it is treated as being in the
20th century: "1999". Zeus correctly determines if a date is in full
four character format before attempting to alter it, even if the
standard for the given protocol states two character names must be
used.
Zeus also correctly generates dates in all years between 1978 and
2038. Dates are stored internally in Zeus as the number of seconds
since the 1st of January 1978, as AmigaOS does, and this will become
unpredictable in approximately 2038.
The file subsystem
Dates are also used extensively when dealing with files. Often, dates
are represented using two digits to reduce typing, and are handled as
described above. ARexx based date conversion functions provided by
Zeus have been updated to handle years over 2000 in four and two
digits, and as such functions such as scanning files since a certain
date work over the 1999-2000 boundary.
The user subsystem
Functions used in the user subsystem treat dates in full at all times
and as such will be unaffected by Y2K problems.
Bulletin subsystem
Bulletins which are set to expire over the 1999-2000 boundary will
expire correctly. The bulletin manager deals with dates in full
and will not be affected.
Notes and disclaimer
While every effort has been made to ensure Zeus 1.2 is year 2000 safe,
we cannot be liable for any losses sustained due to malfunction. The
disclaimer as provided with the Zeus software applies.
This document does not take into account 3rd party software, which may
or may not be Y2K compliant.