iVasion MacPoET V1.1 Y2K issue - cosmetic or worse?

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At 9:30 AM on 01/01/2000 I reported a Y2K issue with the MacPoET V 1.1 software supplied by my ADSL ISP, Bell Atlantic Internet Services. I have worked with a number of individuals within Bell Atlantic, including the CEO, Myles Mendelsohn and a representative of the software developer, iVasion/Routerware.

Bell Atlantic was able to reproduce the issue in late February 2000.

The issue is that following Apple Computer and Microsoft's recommendations, I enabled the SHOW CENTURY feature of the DATE & TIME control panel of MacOS 8.6. This causes the time and date stamp in the MacPoET log to display the first two digits of the year. Thus, 1 January 2000 would be displayed as 01/01/20 instead of 01/01/2000 or 01/01/00.

My concern is that the missing two bytes may be overwriting other addresses in memory, causing a memory leak or other fault.

Along with other ADSL connectivity issues, which affected other customers and appear to have been solved, I have concurrently experienced spontaneous loss of session errors. These usually occur sometime during the day while I am at work. When I return, I find I cannot send or receive packets and I must disconnect and reconnect the session.

Neither Bell Atlantic or iVasion/Routerware can establish whether there is any link between the Y2K issue with MacPoET and the intermittant loss of service. Neither Bell Atlantic nor iVasion/Routerware can supply a Y2K compliance statement for MacPoET V 1.1.

My question is, how can I eliminate Y2K as a possible cause of my connectivity issue? Can I get a Y2K compliance statemen for MacPoET? I understand that without access to the source code and a complier that enables bounds checking or memory protection, it is difficult to test the software for memory leaks / bounds errors or other faults.

I have screen shots of the MacPoET log file if these would be of use.

-- Mark Frautschi (frautsch@tmn.com), March 14, 2000

Answers

Good post Mark, thank you.

Dee

-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), March 14, 2000.


Mark, keep archiving those screen shots. A group of us are doing that here. That's invaluable documentation down the road-not enough people are doing it yet, hopefully more will start. Thanks for the post.

-- another government hack (keepwatching_2000@yahoo.com), March 14, 2000.

Why the totally different email address? How many people can have the name of Mark Frautschi? Bogus or not? I read this man, don't believe this is him. SCADA et all.

-- Mr. Ph.D (your@ddressisn't.com), March 14, 2000.

I noticed that one of the respondents questioned whether I was me. I assure you that I am myself, and I agree that there are very few Mark Frautschi's in the world and only one who worked on Y2K, back in the days when it held the national spotlight. :-)

The best way to resolve any doubts would be to e-mail the URL for this page to the "real" Mark Frautschi and ask him to confirm whether the post was his - er, uh, mine. I promise to post the letter and my response here.

Regarding my unusual e-mail address, it's the same one I give on my web page http://www.tmn.com/~frautsch/ which you are welcome to confirm.

Thanks,

Mark Frautschi

-- Mark Frautschi (frautsch@tmn.com), March 14, 2000.


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