Y2K Compliance - A smooth rollover to Year 2000

By now you will all know that the university's vigilance and caution has paid off. No problems have been found so far in any mission critical systems. Many thousands of potential problems were eliminated over the past 18 months but of course there is still some chance that failures will occur in parts of systems that only run infrequently. There is also the possibility of systems not taking account of the leap year, so it is not quite over yet.

In the final stages of the Y2K exercise, the University Y2K Contingency Task Force which was chaired by Pro-Vice-Chancellor Professor Felix Wu was created with representatives from central adminsitrative offices with university-wide Y2K responsibilities such as the Registry, Finance Office, Estates Office, Safety Office etc. This policy forming group in turn established the Emergency Response Team headed by Dr P.T. Ho, the Deputy Director of the Computer Centre, to co-ordinate responses.

While most people in the university were enjoying the millennium celebrations, Computer Centre staff together with people from the Estates Office, Finance Office, Registry and Safety Office were checking equipment and software to make sure that everything would be working in time for Monday the 3rd. The first test began at 7pm on the 31st when New Zealand reached midnight and potential problems with the internet. The real testing time was midnight in Hong Kong. Everything went well but we all came back again at 9 am to do more complete checks on the network, the accounting and personnel systems etc. Many of you may not know that in addition to masterminding the University of Hong Kong Y2K campaign, Dr N. Ng, the Computer Centre Director also had the task of co-ordinating the responses of all eight HK tertiary institutions to the UGC.

As mentioned earlier, there still remains the potential problem of February 29th, as very many people believed until recently that centuries never have leap years and wrote software accordingly. All computer Centre systems have been tested for this but systems and network staff will be on duty at midnight on the 28th/29th just in case.

Finally, I would like to pass on a good tip given to me by a colleague in the Computer Centre. If you have an old computer at home and want it to record the correct date rather than one in 1980, ignore the OS request to enter the year part of the date as 2 digits and enter it in full as 2000. It works with Comtech 486s and Spectrum 286s and may well with many others.

D.P. Carthy
Tel: 2859 0535
Email: dpc@cc.hku.hk

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