samba

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Year 2000 Issues


We are starting to get a lot of Y2K compliance questions. The answer is an unqualified "yes". Samba has no difficulty with dates from now until well into the next century. However, since Samba is nearly always used with many other pieces of software to create an SMB filesharing network it is important to understand the issues.

Server Issues

Firstly, Samba does not have any Y2K problems. Dates are stored internally in the standard Unix 32 bit time since-1970 format (known as time_t format). Samba has to manipulate dates in other formats but these other formats (those that SMB uses) do not have a Y2K problem either. This is true no matter what platform Samba is running on, even if the platform does not understand time_t at all.

At least one person has run a Y2K compliance tester over Samba. The only problem found was that the date format logged in the debug logs used a strftime() macro which produces a 2 digit year. This didn't really matter as these logs are never read by a program, they are just there for humans to read if they want to know who logged in when. This problem has been fixed in the current release - please don't report it again!

Secondly, the SMB protocol that Samba uses does not have a Y2K problem. None of the date formats in SMB (and there are several) are ASCII and none suffer from Y2K rollover. There are lots of other problems with SMB date handling but Y2K isn't one of them. In some ways this is just pure luck as date handling is one of the worst aspects of the SMB protocol (it is truly horrendous!). These other problems are the same for all implementations of SMB, such as Windows NT, OS/2 etc.

However, the operating system that you run Samba on may have a Y2K problem. Samba runs on around 40 operating systems from nearly as many different vendors, from Fujitsu to IBM to Siemens-Nixdorf and so on. We have no way of knowing what the behaviour of all of these operating systems will be in the year 2000, although all users should be trying to find out now. Samba might fail on some of these systems due to the failure of some essential underlying service (networking, printing subsystem etc). On Unix (and most Samba sites run Unix) can take some comfort in the knowledge that nearly all Unix system utilities do what Samba does and use time_t date formats which are safe in Y2K.

Even under Unix there are some exceptions though, but there is no way that the Samba Team can know what operating system you are running or what weird utilities you use that may cause problems. All users should be making sure that their operating systems and utilities are known to be Y2K-safe. There are some very intensive efforts going on in the free software community to make sure that open source products do not have any problems. With operating systems like Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and others you can run compliance testers yourself and be as sure as it is possible to be that your server is safe.

Client Issues

Regardless of how Y2K-safe the server is, the clients you use to access Samba may have problems. This is in fact the most likely source of difficulties. If the clients do have a problem then it won't matter which server you are using (Samba, Windows NT, Syntax etc), you will hit the same problems. It is likely that any problems you do hit won't have anything to do with the SMB subsystem in your client, but it is certainly not guaranteed.

The problems are most likely to be in the operating systems that the clients are using. The most common clients are Windows 3.1, Windows 95, DOS and Windows NT machines, and there is a lot of literature to read on their behaviour in Y2K. Macintosh, OS/2 and other clients should be checked as well, of course.

Documenting Y2K Compliance for Samba-Related Software

Over time it should be possible to build a table of software used in Samba installations and indicating whether it has been checked, and if so what the result was.

I would greatly appreciate it if people who run Y2K tests involving Samba could please forward the results to samba-bugs@samba.org, and note whether you will allow the results to be published on this web site.




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