Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
Hi, Just did a giant Sid dist-upgrade. It caused trouble with the clock.The hwclock is kept at local time. And 'hwclock --debug --directisa' says just that.But now when the system boots it thinks that the time is UTC time and so for the local time it subtracts 5 hours.That causes e2fsck to fail on all partitions in /etc/fstab because the time in their superblocks is 5 hours ahead of what it thinks the local time is.date gives the true local time -5 hours date -u gives the true local time /etc/timezone has SystemV/CST6CDTSo my question is: who at boot time is responsible for realizing that the hwclock is kept in local time and UTC time?
And the answer is: /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh and /etc/init.d/hwclockfirst.sh do that from package util-linux.
But after the upgrade to util-linux version 2.16-3 the hwclock command fails to work on my system w/o the --directisa option. And these scripts don't use that.
So the clock cannot be set nor saved. As a result the system thinks that the current localtime is UTC and that the true localtime is 5 hours earlier.
Then when you reboot all fs get errors because the superblock time is 5 hours in the future, producing an unusable system.
My solution was to dpkg -i util-linux_2.13.1.1-1_i386.deb which installed a util-linux version with a working hwclock.
On second thought I think I should have just replaced /sbin/hwclock with the working version.
It's a bug: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=542443 But util-linux has currently 439 bugs reported. Hugo