Re: Proposed documentation/script changes for potato (ntp/chrony/util-linux)
On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, andrew@pimlott.ne.mediaone.net wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 31, 2000 at 01:56:54AM -0200, Henrique M Holschuh wrote:
> I don't read debian-devel frequently, so I just caught up on all this
> discussion, however I did file one of the bugs about this. Thank you
> for taking on this issue! I have one problem:
Someone still needs to get the hands dirty and do some coding for it to be
effective, though.
> > To set the date/time of the system, just use the standard UNIX date facilities
> > (such as date)
>
> This advice ignores the admonitions I've read in many places that one
> should never adjust the system clock discontinuously, especially not
> backwards. Do you have any thoughts on this?
Setting the clock backwards is always a pain (it screws up log timestamps,
for one), wether you do it continuously or not. I really wish all logging
was done in UTC, at least the timestamps wouldn't repeat themselves when
leaving daylight savings time.
As for stepping the clock forward, I've seen it cause all sort of weirdness
(e.g.: activating X screensavers :-) ), however I've never seen any really
hazardous effects (e.g.: hardware failures), at least not in Linux. My
system does clock stepping every boot (ntpdate -b), and ntp actually causes
the clock to step sometimes when the syncronization is lost. So far, nothing
complained too loudly about it...
The truth is that we have to choose between the lesser of two evils, and
stepping the clock seems to be the lesser one here (as opposed to completely
hosing the system time because the user doesn't know how to deal with the
two clocks and /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh during shutdown).
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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