Where I Was on Y2K

I was working at a small startup called RipTech and we were moving from a professional services offering to a completely new idea of Managed Security, where we would house all of the firewall and IDS logs from businesses and aggregate the logs and report back to them on probable security incidents. We called the service “eSentry”

As part of this new effort, we created a Security Operations Center, which was really a large room with some servers situated over a furniture store in Alexandria, Virginia. We were growing pretty quickly and had a 24/7 presence, and usually we stuck a single junior guy in the room for the overnight. We didn’t get a whole lot of alerts and typically the overnight was spent watching movies or surfing the web while trying to fight sleep. But it was the holidays and I drew the short straw and had to stay in the SOC while the world was supposedly plunging into chaos due to Y2K clock issues.

The night passed with no glitches or problems despite all of the media hype, planes kept flying and no one had to have a riot in the grocery store to get food.

F-Secure looks back on the Y2K hype and credits the efforts of programmers for heading off the major glitches and reminds everyone that some of the dumber workarounds are going to cause problems in a day or so.

Some Y2K fixes in 1999 were real quick-hacks. For example a logic like this could have been applied: IF YEAR < 10 THEN YEAR = YEAR + 2000 ELSE YEAR = YEAR + 1900. Hacks like that would create problems now, in 2009 and 2010.

Where were YOU on Y2K?