[tyingq]

It won't be the same magnitude of issues. However, I'm sure there will be plenty of apps on said 64 bit Linux that have issues. I commented about a mysql problem here that exists on 64 bit MySQL, on 64 bit Linux. It's not much of a stretch that some internal apps at a company would have similar issues.

Edit: Ntp has something of a protocol issue to be addressed as well.

[JdeBP]

There's always TAICLOCK.

* http://cr.yp.to/proto/taiclock.txt

Technically, "always" is a stretch. But it's shorter than "until the age of the universe is well over an order of magnitude bigger than it is now".

[HankB99]

Yeah. I was working on an IoT system that uses NTP to set time. I generally plan a 20 year life span for tings like this. There's S/W I wrote over 20 years ago that is in devices still in use. The only good thing about this is that I'll not likely be around when trouble crops up. I didn't see any way to accommodate changes that are nearly decades away in code I write today.

[astrodust]

Once in a while you'll stumble upon a Novell Netware server that's been running since the mid 1990s. Twenty years isn't a long time.

[madphrodite]

Novell 3.x or 4. IPX/SPX only. print, file and directory service. Netware client for windows. Man I loved those days.

[drzaiusapelord]

Yeah but that's a protocol issue. Single graybeard devs aren't going to be paid to fix that. The people who run ntp are going to push out a new protocol way before 2038.

Even if there are issues, more than likely they'll be able to handle it internally. OO programming isn't going anywhere and modern languages and concepts are easier to work with than piles of undocumented COBOL from Y2K. They won't be calling you with help to change date fields. That's trivial stuff.

[tyingq]

Right, but at a high level, I'm answering why there might be money in consulting on this later.

There will be Fortune 500 companies that have old ntp clients running somewhere in 2038...pretty much guaranteed. They'll also have apps with 32 time_t structures running as well, database columns that overflow, etc. Or maybe they won't, but aren't sure. You sell them a service that audits all of those things, scripts that look for troublesome stuff using source code greps, network sniffing for old protocols, static analysis, simplistic parsing of ldd, etc. And, a prepackaged methodology, spreadsheets, PowerPoint to socialize the effort, and so on.

It was the same for Y2K. Fixes for many things were available well ahead of time. Companies had no methodology or tools to ensure that the fixes were in place.

[cdelsolar]

The NTP issue will actually surface in 2036, so your consultancy better be up and ready 2 years early!

[astrodust]

Great, so not only will the epochalypse happen but we'll have no idea how close we are since our clocks are drifting like Paul Walker.

[galdosdi]

Where there's development, there's support