Page 91: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (June 1999)

Communication Technology addition, Inmarsat has had to ensure that all GPS receivers are able to manage the rollover that will occur in the system at midnight on August 21/22, 1999.

Following this extensive inventory and risk assessment, a short list was drawn up of priority systems which would be vulnerable to the year 2000 date change.

The key systems to be investigated included the satellites, LESs, network co-ordination stations, mobile earth sta- tions (MESs), the service activation sys- tem, mobility management, telemetry, tracking and command (TT&C) ser- vices, satellite and network control and monitoring systems including GPS receivers.

During 1997 most of the priority sys- tems had been tested to see how they would react to the date change and plans were drawn up which detailed how to solve the various problems.

Rollover and reboot tests were run to check calendar transitions on the fol- lowing dates: • December 31,1999 - January 1, 2000 (the transition to the new century); • February 28 - 29,2000 and Febru- ary 29 - March 1, 2000 (checks for the Leap Year); • December 30 - 31, 2000 and

December 31, 2000 - January 1, 2001 (checking for any problems caused by there being 366 days in 2000).

A check and resolution of records was also made of possible default end/reten- tion dates such as 9.9.99. "We did find some funny things hap- pening when we ran these tests," said

Govier. "The date that a system transi- tions to could be just about anything; one system went from 1999 to 19100, another to February 16, 1936 — it just totally flipped because it didn't recog- nize the '00'." "Having assessed the impact of the tests, we planned to complete the solu- tions and changes on the priority sys- tems by December 1998 to give us one year of contingency before the rollover to the year 2000," she explained. "We've

Help on the web

A number of maritime authorities have gotten together to help the shipping world by posting "help pages" on Internet sites. These include: http://www.inmarsat.org/year2000 (Inmarsat website with Year 2000 page) http://www.itu.int/y2k (ITU webpage) http://www.lr.org/links/index.html (Lloyds Regis- ter and Thomas Miller insurers) http://www.microsoft.com/technet/year2k/ (Microsoft) http://www.bug2000.co.uk (Action 2000, the UK government's Y2k task force)

June, 1999 also had to continually re-evaluate the priority of all other systems to escalate those whose business drivers may have changed. And, during 1999, we will investigate and implement solutions where necessary on all other non-priori- ty systems."

The team also thoroughly tested all the satellite control center (SCC) equipment

LUater UUei< "LOAD TEST SPE • Crane Te • Davit Testing • Li • Bridge Testing • St • Ballast & Corn •Sale • Rental • Lease economical and software at Inmarsat's hot redun- dant back-up control center, which can be made ready at a second's notice if there is a failure at Inmarsat's London headquarters or if its building is in any danger. "We were able to provide a testing environment exactly the same as the operational environment," said

Govier. "It includes a simulation of the

Inc. of water as a

TT&C network so that we can pretend the SCC is linked to TT&C sites."

By the end of 1998, the impact analy- sis phase had progressed according to plan, the project was ahead of schedule and 50 percent of all priority systems identified had been through compliance testing, while several other key systems were undergoing final checks.

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