Re: Warning for UX owners - date

[Chris Kloiber <ckloiber rochester rr com>]

Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> 
> This concerns only UX owners.  No other Alpha platform is affected.
> 
> If you are using the latest 6.1 Red Hat distribution then when startup
> scripts detect that you are booting with milo they will add,
> automatically, regardless of settings in /etc/sysconfig/clock, a flag
> '-A' which forces ARC interpretation of a hardware supplied time.
> 
> That would be not so bad if for not the fact that 6.1 is using
> /sbin/hwclock from 'util-linux' package and on UX an effect of this flag
> with this program is to back off date by 20 years.  If you will give
> '-S' instead, or if you will skip both '-A' and '-S', your date will be
> fine.  So, if you do today a new installation on UX, or an upgrade to
> 6.1, you will end up in a year 1980.
> 
> Moreover, the maintainer of 'util-linux', Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl,
> vehemently insists, for reasons which are hard for me to comprehend,
> that this is THE correct behaviour so things are likely to stay that
> way.  If you want to explain basic facts of life to Andries - be my
> guest.  I tried and failed; but maybe, if more people will express an
> opinion similar to mine that breaking an established and expected
> behaviour of /sbin/clock is just a bug, he will be more receptive.
> 
> The simplest fix for the moment is to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.sysconfig and
> comment out a statement which adds this uncalled for '-A'.  I filed bug
> reports with Red Hat, together with patches to fix 'hwclock' and we will
> see.  But I will be not surprised if other distributions would be
> affected in the same way.
> 
> Once again, if your machine is not UX then things are cool.
> 
>   Michal

I have a 164Sx. My clock always reads 20 years fast. I'd be happy if
they could slow it down a might...

Chris Kloiber