Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Y2K dry run?

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:12/26/1998; 9:27:42 AM
Topic:Y2K dry run?
Msg #:1733
Prev/Next:1731 / 1734

Today, at midnight this server crashed running its overnight scripts. I had just installed a new alpha release of the Frontier kernel yesterday, and there were a bunch of problems this morning, and thinking about this led me to an interesting place.

Background.. We're getting our server runtime act cleaned up. There's a single log file, a guest database, that accumulates information as the server is running. One file for every day.

The sensitive point for all the logging functionality is the rollover that happens at midnight every night. Here's how it works. On every logged event, we check to see if date.day () is the same as it was for the last event. If not, we close the current log file, create a new one for the new day, and start logging into that file. So handling a day change is a totally automatic event.

Now, handling a month change on our CMS still requires some manual work. I have to create a new table for the month, in several places, add a new outline entry in another place, and I don't have a checklist for this, so the problems manifest themselves, I emit a little groan (why don't I automate this?) and go ahead and do it manually.

And then I just had a thought, since we're putting so much effort to getting logging under control, there's going to be an incredible learning opportunity coming up in one week, when we not only get a day and month change, but we get a year change too.

So I'm going to think about this, about ways to watch and log what goes wrong on the year change, and that'll give us ideas for the century and millennium change that's coming up in a little over a year!

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:46:59 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.