Re: NTP-woes

[Dave Baker <dave@dsb3.com>]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 03:31:30PM +0100, Robert Waldner wrote:
> Ok, it lost it's NVRAM again, but here comes the (for me) confusing 
>  part:
> 
>

[snip]

> Any hints on how I could reliably fix that? I can set the time to 
>  something closer to reality, then ntpdate works, but that seems 
>  especially ugly if done in an init-script.
> 

I had a problem on my SS2 until I got a replacement NVRAM (be careful, the
one I got from Mouser was of the right type, but has a bad bit set in the
ram (the later batches follow the actual spec more rigourously).  For me,
this means I just get a boot time warning on the TOC bit (going from
memory, I'm travelling and don't have access to my notes).

My interim solution.

On shutdown, I have an init script to just 'touch /some/filename'
On bootup, I set the system date to the timestamp of that file, then run
ntpdate, then run ntpd.

I think ntp has a safety check that prevents it from leaping the system
clock by more than so many years (makes sense really), so getting it set
close enough in this way was good enough for me.

For reference, I think OpenBSD does this out of the box so you might want
to check their init scripts.  They may even snag the timestamp of the /
directory - I definitely remember booting OpenBSD with an NFS mounted root
and it picking up the NFS server's date without me doing anything to
encourage it.


Dave



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