To all Programmers(of experience please) and Database Administratos,

I am a thirty-three veteran of the Mainframe, mini-computer, process computer, network, etc... wars, but I need information from you working folks. I know the condition on my own companies plans for Y2K and I know our compliance (or ready or whatever) status. How about some of you folks chipping in with your own knowledge of things.

Me First! My company is mostly ready, not completely, just mostly. We have several PC to PLC applications to finish mostly because the PC's are old with flaky BIO's. We are still unable to determine if all of our customers/vendors are ready. We interface with one of the larger railroads and they have not finished all of the interface testing to our satisfaction yet. Our Electric provider has assured us that we will have power, but as we are an interruptable customer we will get shut off first. If we have no power we have no business. I work at a large aluminum smelter and we use more power per day than the three largest cities in the state use on a HOT summer day. We also use rail/truck transportation services to get raw materials in and produced product out. We are vulnerable also to Natural Gas supplies.

We have many questions to answer before the end of the year. We know our systems will be ready, but we are still concerned about our vendors ability to be ready. Lack of knowledge means that we have also started implementing the part of our contingency plans that need to occur before the end of the year. Looks like it could be a rough ride, but lack of info causes us to say "I DON'T KNOW".

Have about it you programmer/DBA's etc. out there. What do you see?

wally wallman

-- wally wallman (wally_yllaw@hotmail.com), November 14, 1999

Answers

Wally --

Place where I work has gone through 2 rounds of assessment, remediation, test and evaluation. Still not there. *Officially*, we are Y2K 'ready'. Actually, the new theory is 'Fix-on-Failure'.

We have equipment with customers that is known to be toast on the 1st. It's old, and cannot be fixed, so must be replaced. There are a couple that cannot even be replaced in the remaining time, as the compilers are old, the source code is gone, and the systems on which the compilers work are gone.

Worse than that, the customers (4 of the top 5), have failed to replace the known bad equipment. So a significant portion of their business is gone on the first. And best guess I've got from the installation guys is 6-8 weeks per installation.

As to the stuff I am working on now, I lead an SCM team. Our stuff is believed to be ready (we finished ripping out all date functionality about two weeks ago), the Vendor tool is thought to have done the essentially the same thing, the OS says they are compliant if the Servers are, and the Server folks say they are compliant if the OS is. In reality, we haven't tested diddly and the test phase got pre-empted by a 'higher priority' project :o).

As for our 'FOF' contingency plan, they called for volunteers to staff the office over the rollover. Paying about a months pay, plus some other goodies. I know of at least one other besides myself who were informed that we were being volunteered, as they had no expectation of getting sufficient skills voluntarily. We will be riding herd over, not just our own stuff, but all the rest of the departmental code (mostly tools, but we are also likely to be called on for help with the test case stuff, builds, and release, assuming that we can get to that point.)

When I asked what it is that I am supposed to do if the Vendor tool isn't quite as ready as it is supposed to be, or the OS, or the Servers, of the development platforms (about 3 or 4 different ones), or the test lab hardware, or ... the answer was (and I quote) "Oh, you'll think of something.", a sentiment which is overwhelming in its belief in the abilities of those who will be there, and underwhelming in its lack of understanding of the problem.

Buckle up, it's gonna be a wild ride.

-- just another (another@engineer.com), November 14, 1999.

Hi Wally,

You work for an aluminum producer and your power is interruptable?

How long does the power have to be off before your smelters become junk? Didn't that happen to two plants in Australian a few years ago?

-- Dean -- from (almost) Duh Moines (dtmiller@midiowa.net), November 14, 1999.

Gentlemen,

Thanks for being here.

-- Laura (LadylLogic46@aol.com), November 14, 1999.

Dean,

We have about eight hours (depending on ambient air temperature) before we are in deep squat. That's why we have actually begin to implement part of our contingency plans. Our smelter usually runs on DC power with AC power for the controls. We can use Large Generators to provide the AC power but no way to do the DC.

Those plants in Australia were restarted at the cost of many millions of dollars. I am not sure our plant will be restarted as it is getting old and is more expensive to operate than newer ones.

wally wallman

-- wally wallman (wally_yllaw@hotmail.com), November 15, 1999.

Yes!! Back to local beer breweries and glass bottles!

-- A (A@AisA.com), November 15, 1999.