January 3, 2000
Only minor Y2K problems occur on campus; others may still appear in months to come
By Jim Burns
The winter quarter at UCSC opened with only a few relatively
minor Y2K glitches on Monday, January 3. No power outages were
experienced in the Santa Cruz area, other utility services to the
campus were uninterrupted, and the campus's payroll-personnel and
student and financial information computer systems passed into
Year 2000 without difficulty.
Pat LeCuyer, acting assistant vice chancellor for Communications and Technology Services, says only three Y2K-related problems had been discovered by Monday morning: erroneous dates were appearing in one of the headers in e-mail created by users of the UC Berkeley mail system (expected to be fixed this week), an error message was appearing when users attempted to modify files using the Unix-based "vi" editing system (fixed), and faculty and staff--but not students--were experiencing an access problem using the Web-based Narrative Evaluation database system (expected to be fixed early this week).
So, all of UCSC's Y2K worries are behind us, right?
Not quite.
Lisa Rose, director of Materiel Management, says Y2K problems in other countries may result in unpredictable disruptions in supply chains--for months. "It's very hard to identify which products may be affected," she says. "My recommendation to people has been to stockpile up to one month's supply of those products or materials that you deem critical to your operation."
LeCuyer says the campus systems' successful transition to Year 2000 is a great satisfaction to the programmers who spent portions of the past two years assessing hundreds of thousands of lines of computer code--and making necessary corrections.
But it doesn't mean that other minor system problems couldn't still crop up. "While
we didn't have major problems with our mission-critical computer systems, I suggest
that people stay vigilant with regards to reports they receive and system screens
and interfaces," says LeCuyer. "Pay attention to dates being displayed
and any formulas which compare dates or use them in arithmetic operations."
People should also pay attention to data files that they have on their individual
workstations or on departmental servers, LeCuyer says, as many of those files may
still have dates stored with a two-digit century. "They will need to convert
these dates to a four-digit century format if they want the dates to sort correctly,
or if they use these dates in any calculations."
The industry-wide estimate is that only 10 percent of Y2K problems will have surfaced
on January 1, 2000, LeCuyer adds. "The remaining 90 percent will emerge over
time, so it's important that we stay vigilant."
