PRIMOS and Leap Days

There are a few PRIMOS issues related to the Leap Day, February 29. These are matters that have been in PRIMOS for many years and are not Y2K related. In fact, the same problems occurred 29-Feb-1988, 29-Feb-1992, and 29-Feb-1996. But some customers will see them on 29-Feb-2000 and think they are Y2K related. They only affect this day and are easy to work around.

PRIMOS Revision 20.2 and 21.0 ONLY

At the above revisions you will see the "Groundhog Day Syndrome" (if you saw the movie you'll know what this means). At 23:59 Feb 28 the system will roll over to 00:00 Feb 29. That's correct. But at 23:59 Feb 29, it will roll back to 00:00 Feb 29 rather than 00:00 Mar 01. This will happen each day until you reset the clock or just boot the system. So make sure to reset the date on the real March 1, 2000 using "SETIME" or just reboot the system.

PRIMOS Revision 22.0 through 23.3

Some versions of MAGSAV will fail when a backup is run on February 29, 2000. It will start to save and then you will see a message like:

Error from DRB-FSR (DRB-10618):
  Media Labelling Error. Invalid field in label. (DR_L_WRITE_HDR_LABELS)

There is no problem with the drive. Just rerun the MAGSAV with a date other than 02 29 00 and it will work fine. Again this problem has occurred every four years. It will not occur with the old "magsav". Rather it requires the "magsav.run" version. Also, it will only occur on older revisions of "magsav.run". It is known to occur on revisions with numbers like this:

[MAGSAV Rev. 1.0.6.r2-22.0 Copyright (c) 1991, Prime Computer, Inc.]

If this is a problem contact Computronics for instructions on downloading a fix, or just wait until the next day.

All PRIMOS revisions

The JOB command will not accept a date of 02/29/00 on the -DEFER option. Just specify a time to work around this. For example:

job myjob -defer 23:00

Contact Computronics if you have any questions about any of these issues.