RE: [cobalt-users] Time funked out after reboot

["Jolley, Carl" <Carl.Jolley@xxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Bonnell
To: cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 8/24/02 2:48 PM
Subject: [cobalt-users] Time funked out after reboot

Hello,

After I reboot any of my RAQ3i systems the date/time ends up at some
time in
the distant future.

Prior to reboot I check the date/time through the admin console and the
unix
data command and it is correct.  After my most recent reboot it came
back with
Jan  6  2003 as the date.

If I then manually correct the date back I have a number of files that
have
been tagged with this future date.  I have to restart cron to get things
working again and hope that none of the files that have been touched
with this
future date will cause problems.

Anyone have a clue how I can fix this?  Is the clock battery dead?
-------------
I too, have had this problem. I don't think that the clock
battery replacement is _necessarily_ the solution to this
problem. The "root" of the problem is that the real-time
clock on the Raq3 is crap.

I have an ntp server congifured via my /etc/crontab to run
every 15 minutes. Still, this is not sufficient. My eventual
solution was to patch the /etc/rc.d/init.d/crond script to
do an npt time check prior to starting. Since crond is 
started after a reboot, this insures that the time is correct
before crond gets fired up and wildly begins to run crontable
entries because it "thinks" its later than it really is.
The patched portion of my crond stript looks like:

# See how we were called.
case "$1" in
  start)
        /usr/sbin/ntpdate ntp.cmr.gov >>/var/cobalt/sauce.log 2>&1
        /sbin/clock -w -u >>/var/cobalt/sauce.log 2>&1
        echo -n "Starting cron daemon: "
        daemon crond

The two lines prior to the echo command was what I inserted.

The lastlog (e.g. last reboot) may show the incorrect time
when the boot was done but the change in the crond script
should fix the problem before crond starts running and
firing up programs with the clock set wrong.