Y2K Downunder

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@ asked what was happening in Australia so I thought I would try an update.

Accourding to my Fed. IT Minister Australia is the most compliant country in the world. We will have no probs, though other countries might have problems.(Sound familiar to you Americans?)

We have nothing like FEMA, our closest thing is the SES our emergency service made up of volunteers, so all government advice comes straight from fed or state gov ministers.

Ill break this up into catagories for you.

State Gov.

My state gov has required parties (Police, Emergency services, Attorney general, Ultilities and others)meet every month to plan for the rollover. In my state the Office of Information and Technology heads all gov activities for Y2k. All government department public releases have to go through the OIT for PR reasons.(Spin?)

As of March this year the 1200 plus users of the State WAN where working on non compliant systems. By this I mean Servers, Desktops and comersial apps such as MS Office(Without Patchs) etc. At this time the State IT folks commenced Assesment of what might need fixing. Notice I did not say they were starting remidiation, just assesment. Previous work in the assesment are was dubious at best.

example; Supervisor "hey IT Staffer Ive got this Y2k thing, needs checking. Is Office compliant?" IT Staffer "yeah I thing so, want me to check?" Supervisor "Nah if you say its OK then thats OK"

The gov has a Y2K co-ord center to be set up in the main state gov office block which will be manned by all the major departments and will watch the rollover tick by.

Many of our department are still working to finish up compliance work.

Utilities

Very quite on this front. Our power went private not that far back so we are only just starting to get private power companies.

Phones are the same, only just starting to get private companies in last 12 months or so.

Rail is sus, only few months ago they did not know if their analogue phones were compliant. they will shut down from 11:45 to 12:15 and 1:45 to 2:15. Original plans for full shutdown were canned because the sudden lack of demand could crash the power providers.

Please note the importance of rail to us with our spread city (50K from center to burbs)last weeks rail strike stranded 1.5 million comuters.

Defence

Our defence dept is rolling out 16000 NT systems to fix the Y2K bug. This is not finished. Many of their logistic systems ran on non compliant mainframes that are still being worked on. Please note that we are currently fully engaged in the timor conflict. that 3500 troops is about all we have and is costing us a screaming fortune. Interest rates have allready gone up to pay for it. So I do not know how much cash is going to Y2K remidiation.

At least Martial Law is out of the question, their a bit busy. LOL

Private Industry

Most small medium places are doing bugger all. My company is multinational. You hit a good point about us being the first to roll over (appart from NZ) My company does a full WAN shutdown starting in Phylidelfia (is that right?) and moving through 76 cities world wide and finishing here in Sydney. Then on the 1st we in sydney will come on line and see if everthing still works. Makes you feel like a bug in a jar with everbody looking at you.

So that's about it I spose. Sorry it was so long.

-- praxis (fake@oz.com.au), October 11, 1999

Answers

Much appreciated praxis! This is great to be able to get information from someone who is right there, so much better than anything from media.

16000 NT systems eh? Quite an endeavour. Oh, the city you're referring to is Philadelphia, although your spelling is really what it sounds like! So when is your company going to do this shutdown, on New Years Eve? 76 cities... whew, pretty big company. Looking forward to hearing more from ya. Thanks again.

-- @ (@@@.@), October 11, 1999.


Great post praxis,Similiar things here in NZ although I don't have all the details you do. The local Army camp is VERY quiet(Gone to East Timor?) but have heard from a young feller I work with who just got out of the Army that the entire force is not getting leave over the new year break!He was understandably pleased that he had decided to leave. That goes for our entire Police force too(about 5000 strong I believe)

-- matt (whome@somewhere.nz), October 11, 1999.

Praxis: Your bloody bureaucrats went to the same school as ours apparently. What do you think about sending them south of you to McMurdo and see how fast they can screw that area up? Have a good day mate from North Central Texas.

-- Neil G.Lewis (pnglewis1@yahoo.com), October 11, 1999.

Hiya Praxis from the West Coast.

They are shutting down the trains here too for about 30 mins for the rollover. Some interesting things are starting to happen around here with me and others noticing that the shelves seem to be a bit barer than usual.

As we are apparantly the most isolated city in the world most of our goods has to travel at least 1500 kilometres to get here. Most things we get are manufactured on the East Coast of Australia, in fact the factories we used to have here have been steadily closing down over the last 20 or so years.

During winter we were on Water restrictions, and of course through summer we definately will be. We have a very big pipeline running from our Dams close to our city that travels 600 kilometres (365 miles) east to a town called Kalgoorlie, the water is for drinking not only for that town but surrounding towns. There is no way they could survive out in the middle of nowhere if the water stopped pumping. I have no idea at this point if the pipe pumps are Y2K compliant or not.

Not many people GI over here, a lot of people saying that nothing will happen and even if it does they'll just muddle through. Know quite a few companies that are claiming compliancy when they are not compliant.

There are Y2K articles appearing in the paper at least once a day now here, some happy happy joy joy, some a bit serious. Been increased mentioning on the radio and on TV.

The city I am in has a population of around 1.2 million with the entire state around 1.8 million. For those people who do not know Australia very well, the state of Western Australia is the largest state of Australia. If memory serves me right, England can fit into Western Australia 26 times. In fact the America's Cup was held here back in (wracks memory) 1983.

As mentioned before we are very isolated so prolonged disruptions in the cartage of goods could have a very serious effect here.

Some Rumours now, take em with a grain of salt:

  • There was a series of car that was not Y2K compliant, to get around 'alarming' people they sent notifications to the owners stating that a chip upgrade had to be made so there car could have 'better handling'. :-) Apparantly at rollover the car would put itself in reverse, all the cars in the series have been modified.
  • Social Security is not Y2K compliant and is stockpiling money. Rumour has it they are hiring extra security guards for next January (They are currently running Windows NT Workstation & Server with Service Pack 4)

    End of rumours.

    Take care everybody.

    Regards, Simon

    -- Simon Richards (simon@wair.com.au), October 11, 1999.


  • Simon the NSW SS has purchased tens of thousands of paper forms so that they can do manual processing if needs be.

    -- praxis (fake@oz.com.au), October 11, 1999.


    Thanks for the news, praxis and Simon. Even though it doesn't sound good. Praxis, you mentioned "Original plans for full shutdown were canned because the sudden lack of demand could crash the power providers." Loss of load. I would be interested in learning more about this.

    While both Australia and New Zealand have troops "away," I'm wondering how well Operation Abacus will do in my country--at present, our troops are spread over 22 locations around the world. One country is discussing whether or not to "bring people home;" we're busy sending them elsewhere!

    -- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), October 11, 1999.


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