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Software work-around for broken BIOS clock?



Problem: I have a machine that keeps loosing it's CMOS settings.
Changing battery works - for a couple of weeks.

It's not too much of a problem, as the only thing that really is
affected is the system time starts at 1st Jan 1990 upon boot-up and the
CD-Rom is inaccessible. (I don't worry about the CD-Rom).

I set up ntp, so whenever it connects to the internet (dial-up), the
time will be set correctly again. But the machine may well run for a
considerable amount of time, before the owners decide to connect to the
internet. And they are very keen on shutting it down when they don't use
it (I'm trying to talk them out of that :-).

But, amongst other things, logcheck gets confused by the sudden
timeshifts that now occur: 
- The machine boots in Jan 1900
- works for an indeterminate number of hours
- (possibly) connects to the internet, and NTP sets the correct time
- system shutdown

Basically, this means that time is not always flowing in the correct
direction (across boot-ups) as far as the software is concerned
(remember, we're not talking mere minutes here, but nearly decades...).
Back to the Future. And forward to the past. 

Is there anything out there that lets me save the system time upon
shutdown, and then read it in again upon start-up (rather than relying
on the BIOS clock) ? I'd like to put a stop to those time-shifts...

I suspect it's relatively easy to write myself, but I can't be the only
one needing a software solution to a hardware problem...

-- 
Karl E. Jørgensen
karl@jorgensen.com
www.karl.jorgensen.com
==== Today's fortune:
I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.
		-- Albert Einstein, on the randomness of quantum mechanics

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