IT Baseline Protection Manual - The Information Warfare Site

Threats Catalogue Deliberate Acts Remarks
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T 2.58 Novell Netware and date conversion to the
year 2000
Under Novell Netware, dates are currently stored in two-digit format, while
the number 19.. is affixed only for the purpose of visual representation.
That means that the date conversion 1999/2000 will cause the sequence of
‘00’ to be interpreted incorrectly as the year 1900 by the running Netware
server. According to a statement of Novel, the date will be set automatically to
1980 after a restart of the server.
This conversion results from the fact that after a restart, the value of (19)00 is
interpreted as an invalid date, for which reason the standard value of (19)80
(the year of birth of IBM PCs) is selected as the valid date.
Although this particular behaviour will not destroy stored data, it will cause
errors within all time-controlled programs for user accounts with an expiration
date, as well as time-driven processes such as data backups, and could, in turn,
result in a loss of data. Above all, considerable problems would occur in the
NDS if the date was suddenly set back. However, it is also important that the
BIOS for the computer is year-2000 compatible and the transition from
31.12.1999 to 1.1.2000 can take place automatically.
These errors currently affect (according to reports from June 1999) versions
NW 2.x, NW 3.x up to version 3.2 and NW 4.x of Novell Netware.
Further details on the response of Novell products to the transition to the year
2000 are available on the Internet under the following URLs, for example:
http://www.novell.de/jahr2000/ and http://www.novell.com/year2000/.
Programs can also be found to test whether Netware Software in use is year-
2000-compatible. Similarly, an overview is provided, showing which Novell
programs have been tested for their year-2000 compatibility and what the
results were.
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IT-Baseline Protection Manual: Oktober 2000