Averting the Year 2038 Disaster

OpenBSD released version 5.5 today, and not only has the OpenBSD team removed the OpenSSL dependency from OpenSSH, they’ve also implemented 64 bit time_t variables on all platforms.

So on Tuesday, January 19th, in the year 2038, when the rest of the world’s Unix systems fail at 3:14:02 Greenwich Standard Time, OpenBSD systems will proceed with business as usual.

I have now fulfilled the promise I made in late 1998 (that I would have an action plan to avert the Y2.038K Disaster by 2018) a good three years early. The plan is: convert to OpenBSD in 2035 if nobody else has caught up.

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