The SCO Unix date problem

[Guy Lancaster <glanca@gesn.com>]

  Many of our older VTS customers are running SCO UNIX
System V/386 which has some year 2000 date problems.  It
seems the biggest culprit is a broken asktime() function
which is used during boot to get the time from the
computer's real-time clock.  Here I describe a workaround
and a patch.

  It seems that the date command does work (on our system at
least) so the date can be corrected after boot.  This must
be done as root (the superuser) with no VTS databases
running (or they may crash).  For example, to set the system
time to 11:00 a.m. Oct 12, 2000 the date command would be:

date 1012110000

You can use "date -?" to display the syntax of the date
command which is "date [ MMddhhmm[yy]] [ +format ]".  The
date function is generally used to query the current date
and time which is what the format spec is for.  Note that
the year (yy) is 00 for 2000.

  To fix things properly you need the SCO Unix patch.  You
can find it at
http://www.sco.com/support/ftplists/xuolist.html under the
heading "SLS uod426d: Year 2000 SLS".

  It could be worth us preparing and stocking a supply of
the patch (SLS UOD426D) disks along with a simplified
version of the installation instructions (Mike? Ian?).  I'm
going to be trying this out on our SCO UNIX box here
hopefully sometime this week.

          Guy