RW> in the BBS itself?  Is the BBS machine running in a VM or is it 
RW> running on real, physical hardware? 

 DM> Irex with its built-in binkp. 

irex is a mailer...

 DM> The dates are correct and intact in the inbound packets.  

ok, so you do have a mechanism where you can save the original stuff before 
processing... that's good... i do the same here and retain 30 days of mail 

 DM> The echomail areas in the BBS are in squish format (and were 
 DM> tossed by squish).  

what version of squish??

 DM> The dates are missing (or appear to be) in the echomail files 
 DM> within the BBS.

what bbs software?

 DM> I'm just using OS/2's included text editor to view them and whether
 DM> looking at the Irex packet or the tossed squish file in the BBS,
 DM> they have lots of funky symbols in them.  These symbols may be
 DM> masking the date in the BBS files, I'm not sure.

you can't use an editor to look at binary data   many do but you really 
should use a proper tool... in this case, you might want to see if you can 
locate david nugent's inspecta... i should have a copy available on my 
system... but it analyses the pkts and allows you to read the messages packed 
into them... it is old but it does allow you to look deep when you need to... 
if one needs to go further, there may be other tools... i haven't looked at my 
analyser in a while so i don't know if it does y2k stuff or not...

 DM> The BBS computer is real, not a vm. 

real iron is always best... maybe not the cheapest but it is the best...

 DM> Regardless I don't think the system clock has any bearing or the 
 DM> dates would be different, just off.  Instead they are all exactly 
 DM> the same.

i'm still thinking a y2k problem in those dates in those packets you are being 
fed...

)\/(ark

 
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