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It has been fixed in the kernel, but many programs and libraries still use (sometimes accidentally casting into) 32 bit ints, and even parts of the Linux Kernel, such as file systems. Databases also use 32 bit timestamps. So deployment of a Linux kernel with 64bit time_t will not automatically heal everything.

Some links:
http://2038bug.com/index.php/a...
I like this one: "What's the worst that could happen?" :) http://y2038.com/#q5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I have the exact requirements as you, so I spent the last six months developing a
solution. It converts SentBoxes, Inboxes, gmail, PST files and regular mbox.

It archives and indexes everything and provides full text search with google-like
phrase grouping and exclude phrases.

It normalizes addresses, eliminates duplicates, understands every character set and
can display any email within it's web GUI with proper inlining of pics-in-html.

For me it can index 8 gigs of emails within a couple of hours.

We are pilot testing this solution at an ISP for our customers.

Would you like to try it out?

My email http://2038bug.com/email.gif

-paul

Linux: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition by Paul Sheer is what I used when I was first getting started using Linux. The first few chapters are about computers in general, and the rest of the book is about Linux. Approximately one third is about being a user, and the rest is about administration. The entire book would be a bit heavy for an introductory computer course, but you would have no difficulty finding in-depth explanations of the things you described (file systems, what the operating system does, etc.) in a Linux context. The book is intended to teach you how to administer Linux systems, but it really gives you a thorough understanding of how the systems you're configuring work. Even if you don't finish the chapter on configuring your box as a router, your students could get a lot out of the first part of that chapter that explains how IP works. It's a very long book. There's probably a section for whatever you would want to talk about in a basic computing course.

I can't recommend this book enough. It is by far the best book that I have found on how to use *NIX systems, but it is much more than that, and it significantly furthered my computer education.

It could get into some serious troubles in 2038, though

I would use Rute by Paul Sheer:

http://linux.2038bug.com/rute-home.html

http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

Rute is a "Rute is a technical reference and teaching tool for new GNU/Linux users as well as advanced administrators". It is available online and in book format. It is copyright 2002, so it isn't terribly out of date.

It is a good curriculum for linux users or administrators. If you don't like the way it is setup you could get the online copy and change it.

The only thing I'd be worried about in terms of datedness is LPI/RHCE certification. I doubt it would get you through RHCE as it now covers SELinux as well which is not really covered in Rute.

I would use Rute by Paul Sheer:

http://linux.2038bug.com/rute-home.html

http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

Rute is a "Rute is a technical reference and teaching tool for new GNU/Linux users as well as advanced administrators". It is available online and in book format. It is copyright 2002, so it isn't terribly out of date.

It is a good curriculum for linux users or administrators. If you don't like the way it is setup you could get the online copy and change it.

The only thing I'd be worried about in terms of datedness is LPI/RHCE certification. I doubt it would get you through RHCE as it now covers SELinux as well which is not really covered in Rute.

When I was looking to learn more about how to use linux a little while after I'd started doing so I asked on the Fedora forum what they would recommend and someone sent me a link to a really great online book which contained so much information of such high quality that I felt like I really learned loads. It's also really easy going for complete n00bs, but I suspect that if I went back I'd still learn new things and have new interesting stuff to look at... you can check it out at http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

If you want a good unix/linux book I honestly don't think there is a better place to start (although some of the information seemed a little out of date (like modems being based on sound waves and hard drives being measured in MBs...) UNIX is UNIX, even if we now have slightly shiny-er linux wrappers)

We'll be oke for food, but busy worrying about and fixing the Year 2038 bug which is due in another 5 years, when old 32-bit unix-family systems will set their clocks back to 1901.

It's not a big issue and as long as programmers are aware then hopefully it will be avoided.

But there are pitfalls out there now which naive programming may fall into.

I came across this one at http://www.2038bug.com/. We hit the 31st bit of POSIX time in 2004. That means that if you add together any two current times, for example when taking an average, then you will overflow a 32 bit signed integer.

Apologies for code quality but this artificial example hopefully shows the issue:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <time.h>
int main ()
{
time_t t,t1,t2;
struct timeval tnow;
gettimeofday(&tnow,NULL);
t1=tnow.tv_sec;
printf ("Time now: %s", asctime (gmtime (&t1)));
t2=t1+100;
printf ("Add 100 seconds: %s", asctime (gmtime (&t2)));
t=(t1+t2)/2;
printf ("Average: %s", asctime (localtime (&t)));
return 0;
}

gives the following on my x86 Linux system:

Time now: Wed Jan 16 11:43:18 2008
Add 100 seconds: Wed Jan 16 11:44:58 2008
Average: Fri Dec 29 08:30:00 1939

It's easy to fix by casting to 64 bit or dividing first but there may be similar examples hiding away in old code which are less easy to spot.

Here is prob the best online resource: http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz - The Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition. IMO, It's every bit as good as anything off the shelf. Have a look at the table of contents and you will see how wide the coverage is. You can also download it in HTML or PDF for local viewing.

Read man pages or if you are on a Red Hat/Fedora system info and pinfo are great.

Choose a distro you feel comfortable with, see what you can change and how this affects the system.

Good luck

Linux Documentation Project ~ Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition ~ Linux Newbie Administration Guide ~ LinuxCommand.org ~ Linux From Scratch ~ FreeBSD Hypertext Man Pages for Red Hat 9

It's been about two years ago now that I embarked on a similar journey to your own. I wanted to find a good Linux distribution that met several criteria:
1. An installation routine that would allow me to dual-boot with Windows easily. My wife still uses Windows and is not yet ready for the transition, and since I earn my daily bread as a Windows sysadmin, I still need to keep it around for some of the things in my job.
2. A community which would be as newbie-friendly as the distribution itself. In the past I had bad experiences with some Linux experts who thought that Linux was, and should remain, the exclusive province of uber-geeks. In non-newbie-friendly support community forums, one may post a question, no matter how well formulated, and one of these fellows will offer helpful replies such as, "what a n00b- if you can't read the man pages, maybe you should go back to window$ or get a commodore64."
3. A reasonably good set of apps and tools built into the distro do to the things I need to do, and a reasonably good package manager to add new apps.
I loaded Mandrake (just prior to the change to Mandriva), looked at Suse, and Fedora. All of them met criteria 1 and 3, though correspondence to criteria 2 was a bit spotty. At that time I heard about a new distribution that was gaining a lot of popularity that had an African-sounding name: Ubuntu. I downloaded the then-current version, and loaded it with no problems. The forum users were hospitable and winsome, and welcomed me home to the distro, and the community tries to live up to the ethos of the word Ubuntu, which is used in several southern African languages, and means something like compassion for fellow human beings (very loosely paraphrased.) Where my previous experiences had been technically adequate and interesting, Ubuntu felt like coming home.
Since one of the reasons I was loading Linux was to join the free software community, I also decided that I would limit myself to obtaining whatever manuals and documentation I could also find that was free and open, in the same spirit of the Free Software Community, and here are some links that I think you'll find helpful:
The first stop on your documentation journey outside of the forums of your chosen distribution and the help guides and wikis therein should be the Linux Documentation Project at http://www.tldp.org/
Full length guides are here: http://www.tldp.org/guides.html Especially helpful to me were Machtelt Garrels Introduction to Linux: A Hands-On Guide and his Bash Guide for Beginners, but all the docs here are worthwhile, freely downloadable and printable.
Another good guide is RUTE: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition Very well written and thorough. The author writes, "You can find out what book a person needs by asking the question, "Do you want to be a Muggle or a Wizard?" (1) If they answer "Wizard", then you give them Rute. (2) If they answer "Muggle", then you give them "Linux for Dummies." (3) If they answer "What's a Muggle?", then you give them "Harry Potter". I had just finished reading the first few Harry Potter books to my kids, and so this tickled me. RUTE is a great starter manual: http://linux.2038bug.com/rute-home.html
Bruce Perens is one of the brighter stars in the firmament of the Free Software movement, and his publisher, Prentiss Hall, has a number of books in the Bruce Perens Series available in PDF format for download here: http://www.phptr.com/promotions/promotion.asp?prom o=1484&redir=1&rl=1
No list would be complete without including the O'Reilly Open Book page. This page includes books such as the Linux Network Administrator's Guide, but also some books on the history and philosophy of the Free Software movement such as Eric S. Reymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition:

http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

I hate to say it this way, but suck it up... as a brain sucks up knowledge. While you're at it, get accustomed to them and how they are written.

That being said, some day, if you're really going to be an *Nix admin, you'll be glad you had them.

You might want to check the very good advice is this free book: LINUX: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition. There is a PDF version out there, but, must of the links to it are to a non-existant directory (just like the link at the top of that HTML version).

He actually gives a good method, even a defense if you will, albeit in few words, about how to read man pages: essentially 3 times (or more).

Man pages are quite the bitter medicine, but they CAN be good for you.

Best of luck. The Linux admin market is heating up (at least in Dallas/Ft. Worth).

This http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz helps me.

...but these are not those books. If you want an absolute beginner's looks at Linux, check out Marcel Gagné's excellent Moving to Linux, Second Edition : Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye! (direct link, no paid click-through). Also worth noting is Paul Sheer's LINUX: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition, that while a bit dated covers the basic concepts of Linux quite thoroughly and also makes quite a good reference guide. I would start with the former, but the latter is free online and the paperback inexpensive to purchase.

It's a shame that it'll only work for three years due to the 2038 bug. :-/

http://www.2038bug.com/

No, the world will actually end Tuesday, January 19, 2038. http://www.2038bug.com/

It looks like we won't have to put in overtime on that 2038 Bug w00t!

http://www.2038bug.com/

its when the 32 bit timestamp that is standarly used to store time gets too large, and overflows.

Modern computers use a standard 4 byte integer for this second count. This is 31 bits, storing a value of 231. The remaining bit is the sign. This means that when the second count reaches 2147483647, it will wrap to -2147483648.

The precise date of this occurrence is Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038. At this time, a machine prone to this bug will show the time Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901, hence it is possible that the media will call this The Friday 13th Bug.

The 2038 article referenced mentions a time error happening on Jan 10, 2004, but offers only a line of C to explain it. Can anybody clarify what is supposed to go wrong 5 days from now?

set up a small network at home

And do it using User Mode Linux. UML is loosely spoken a way to simulate linux machines on top of another machine. Then you'll only need one machine, and you can experiment without needing to reinstall - backing up/restoring a UML machine is a matter of copying a single file.

Personally I've learned a lot from the Rute Linux Tutorial though it's a bit dated now.

The best place for questions:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/

More reading:
http://www.tldp.org/

------
You've seen the posts, now see the website!
http://hiddenuniverse.blogspot.com/

and then, their server crashes due to the Y2038 bug oh wait *it's already here*

Other DNS software

This is a list of some other DNS software out there:

Freely downloadable DNS servers

Caching DNS servers

• BIND 9 is a complete rewrite of BIND, and, as such, probably does not have the security issues that previous versions of BIND has. In fact, one of the BIND developers found a security problem in earlier versions of MaraDNS. Very full-featured, and is the reference standard for the newer DNS RFCs.
• Oak DNS is a DNS server written completely in python. It is compatible (I think) with both BIND zone files and cache files.
• pdnsd is a recursive caching DNS server. Paul Rombouts is the current maintainer of this program.
• Posadis is another DNS server project, similiar to MaraDNS. This server is now both a resolving and an suthoritative DNS server.

Non-recursive DNS servers

• PowerDNS is an authoritative-only DNS server with support for, among other things, SQL. I would like to applaud the PowerDNS developers for making a libre release of this software. Note: Recursive code is in the works; PowerDNS will soon enough be a fully functioning recursive DNS server.
• DnsJAVA is an authoritative-only DNS server written in Java.
• NSD is an authoritative-only DNS server which is compatible with BIND zone files.
• MyDNS is an authoritative-only DNS server which uses MySQL as a database back end.
• The Pliant language/package comes with a DNS server. This DNS server can not recursively process DNS queries given a list of root servers.
• Twisted includes a non-recursive DNS server.
• The Eddit project includes a DNS server
• SheerDNS is a simple non-caching DNS server that stores all records as their own files.

Abandoned DNS server projects

These are DNS server projects which have not released any files for six months or longer, and which never became functioning recursive (caching) DNS servers.

• MooDNS is another DNS server project. A CVS checkout on January 21, 2003 shows that no files have been updated since July 20, 2002, except for a single readme file updated on August 1, 2002. This project is abadoned.

  I have made a tarball available for people who do not want to bother with a CVS checkout.

• Dents is a DNS server that showed a lot of promise. Unfortunatly, no files have been released since 1999.
• Yaku-NS is a DNS server geared towards embedded systems. According to the changelog, no one has made any changes to this software since Feburary, 2001.
• CustomDNS has not released any files since the summer of 2000.

Other

• LdapDNS is a small DNS server which converts DNS requests in to LDAP requests, without caching.
• DnsPython is a DNS toolkit for Python.

http://threading.2038bug.com/xml-answer.html

-paul