2010: Is it all hype?

When it turned the year 2000, there was all this worry that computers would crash, and our infrastructure would have problems from date rollover. Nothing significant happened. But we surprised ourselves as the year 2010 came around, and there were actually news reports of computers having problems with the date change.

Some of the reported problems included:

Symantec's "Endpoint Protection" business anti-virus solution started the new year by labelling signatures dated 01/01/2010 or newer as "out of date" even though the signatures are current. Symantec is reportedly working to fix the flaw. Until an update has become available, the vendor will date any further new signatures December 31, 2009 and only increase the revision number. Affected products include Symantec Endpoint Protection v11.x and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition v12.x.

The Internet Storm Center reports that Cisco's Content Switching Module (CSM) has problems with its load balancing feature. The default cookie expiration in the load balancer is reportedly set to 01/01/2010 and has, therefore, expired. As a result, connections to programs such as web applications are reportedly being continuously "rebalanced".

I guess it's never too late to check to make sure your code is date compliant.