Re: modules.dep too old?

[Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net>]

On Sat, Feb 12, 2000 at 01:50:40PM +1100, Brian May wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> So far I have encountered similar problems on every potato system I
> administrate.
> 
> The problem:
> 
> on startup I get the message the modules.dep is older then my
> modules.conf file. sometimes (if not always) this happens right after
> the module dependancies are rebuilt via the startup process (this
> rebuilding happens on every startup - right?)
> 
> Today, I went to investigate:
> 
> snoopy# ls -l /lib/modules/2.2.14/modules.dep
> -rw-r--r--    1 root     root         2439 Feb 12  1996 /lib/modules/2.2.14/modules.dep
> 
> 1996?????? My clock says: snoopy# date
> Sun Feb 13 00:43:50 EST 2000
> 
> actually this is dead wrong (I have fixed that) but I don't
> know where 1996 come from... All other files have the correct year,
> 2000. Similarly, this fixes the problem, too:
> 
> snoopy# depmod -a
> snoopy# ls -l /lib/modules/2.2.14/modules.dep
> -rw-r--r--    1 root     root         2439 Feb 13 00:45 /lib/modules/2.2.14/modules.dep
> 
> I don't understand why the depmod -a command in the boot script should
> produce such a bad date, anyone else noticed similar problems?

this has been observed on Powerpc too, except the modules.dep file
ends up getting its date set to epoch (Dec 31, 1969 (i thought it was
Jan 1 1970?)) it only appears to happen when the hardware clock is set
to local time and not GMT, but that is not proven..

if you look in /etc/rcS.d/ you will see that modutils is run BEFORE
hwclock but I don't see how that would cause a time descrepency of 4
years much less 30... unless of course your hardware clock is very
wrong and you use ntpdate to set your clock right at boot.  (but then
you must have disabled the hwclock --systohc thing at shutdown)

-- 
Ethan Benson