Any confirmed evidence (URLs helpful) that a non-compliant PC could affect the functioning of other compliant PCs (including servers) on either LANs or WANs?

In essence we have DGIs saying "I'll change the date on the day".

-- Bob Barbour (r.barbour@waikato.ac.nz), December 03, 1998

Answers

A non-compliant pc serving as a message gateway, or a proxy server, or a similar function would definitely impact the functioning of _software_ on other pcs. In the instance of serving as a gateway for a mail program, if the gateway pc goes down due to Y2K non- compliance, no messages will go through it either to WAN or Internet connections, and there goes your company's mail from one office to another. In the case of a non-compliant proxy server, there goes the company's Internet connection, regardless of how compliant other pcs (workstations, servers, etc.) are.

Hardware, anybody?

-- Karen Cook (browsercat@hotmail.com), December 03, 1998.

Check out Novell's site and their offer of free software and evaluation of any Novell server running any version of Novell software. Their software checks out the entire server, and sends the results to Novell, they evaluate it and return a report to you pronto. So if you are running Novell Groupwise using a Novell server as the gateway you can find out all about this issue with minimum effort.

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), December 03, 1998.

We had a doctor's office with 13 workstations running on a Novell network. Server was running the practice management system with PC's acting basically as smart "dumb" terminals. They tried to input an appointment for several months out into 2000. The whole thing crashed. Turns out the server, most of the workstations, and the Novell were all non compliant. Shortly after that, they received a letter from the software company telling them they were no longer going to be supporting the application.

On another note, a local home health care outfit that uses MedWare to file its claims electronically received a letter saying the same thing this week. In case you don't know, MedWare is pretty big in practice management and claims filing. It's also worthy to note that for the past 6 months or so, they had been sending out letters saying they were on track and would be ready to issue updates as of March 31, 1999. Then, boom, dropped the bomb in one day.

-- Greg Sugg (gregsugg@bbnp.com), December 03, 1998.

Greg,

Do you mean "Medware" itself won't be compliant by its schedule date of March 1999, or that they won't have a software release available by then that's useable elsewhere by Mar 1999?

-- Robert A. Cook, P.E. (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), December 04, 1998.