[HECnet] DECnet-10 doesn't work past Nov 9 2021?

[Peter Lothberg]

Making it unsigned on t10/t20 is simple, can the VMS/RSX/etc experts we 
have here set their system date to 2022 and se what happens? 

Thanks John for the clarification. 

-P 

> From: "John Forecast" <john at forecast.name>
> To: "hecnet" <hecnet at Update.UU.SE>
> Sent: Sunday, December 27, 2020 12:30:54 PM
> Subject: Re: [HECnet] DECnet-10 doesn't work past Nov 9 2021?

>> On Dec 27, 2020, at 11:46 AM, Robert Armstrong < [ mailto:bob at jfcl.com |
>> bob at jfcl.com ] > wrote:

>> This topic came up on the alt.sys.pdp10 list
>> [ https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sys.pdp10/c/ZttQxHZGEJQ |
>> https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sys.pdp10/c/ZttQxHZGEJQ ]
>> Apparently DECnet-10 won’t work past November 9 th 2021, which isn’t that far
>> away. Personally I’d never heard this before and had no idea, and since I know
>> there are a few 36 bit emulations on HECnet that are obviously using DECnet I
>> thought I’d pass it along.
>> TOPS20 isn’t explicitly mentioned, but I’m guessing that it has the exact same
>> issue. That’d mean no DECnet on 36 bit systems after next year! Unless, of
>> course, you want to start playing games with the date (which I hate doing)…
>> Bob

> It’s not just a DECnet-10/20 problem. DECnet event logging for any system may
> fail after Nov 9th 2021. Events are time-stamped when they are generated with a
> 2-byte field holding the number of half julian days since Jan-1 1977. The spec
> (Network Management 4.0.0, page 170/171) implies that these 2 bytes should be
> treated as a signed value (0 - 32767) which will overflow on Nov 9th 2021. If
> the code treats it as unsigned, then we’re good for another 44 years. I wrote
> most of the RSX and Ultrix event logging code but I don’t remember if that
> field was treated as signed or unsigned. Phase V fixed the problem allowing the
> time stamp to go well past the year 9999.

> John.
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