[Fwd: Re: Setting up time properly? Local time zone must be set--see zic manu]

[Dennis Robertson]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Setting up time properly? Local time zone
must be set--see zic manu
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 18:40:36 +0000

Spider,
NOTE: Even though the machine is dual-boot for the sake of these
problems I am purposely NOT going into Windows. This problem is Linux
only.

I dual boot and windows shows correct local time.

1) I have tried a 2.6.6 generic kernel and a 2.6.8 gentoo-dev-sources
kernel and gotten the same results.

Ditto for linux-2.6.9-rc1-mm1. I also got the latest coreutils.

2) I have set system BIOS time to my local time.
5) I boot and run rdate to set my system clock time since BIOS time
isn't getting picked up. I then write system time back to the hardware

my BIOS time is picked up correctly

CLOCK="local"
10) uname -a says

Linux dencar 2.6.9-rc1-mm1 #2 Fri Aug 27 17:53:23 UTC 2004 i686 AMD
Athlon(tm) XP 2800+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

note it is showing the correct local time I've set, but is calling it UTC.

Thanks in advance for reading through all of this and sharing your
experience. I'm beginning to think that the kernel's support for this
new ATI chipset may not work correctly.
Cheers,
Mark

I have an ATI 9700 pro in my desktop. The clock has always worked
correctly in local time until about 2 weeks ago.
I had a look at a Mandrake machine last night and noticed that the
entries in /usr/share/zoneinfo were small scripts, including reference
to EST (eastern standard(Australian) time). Those in Gentoo say just
TZif. I wonder where the scripts are?

How to get the clock to local time again, Spider? Hope you can help.

Cheers,
Dennis
--
Dennis Robertson

"He shall enlarge upon the danger of his adventure, but in my sleeve
will be heard the tinkling of silvery laughter."

[Collins Richey]

Post by Dennis Robertson
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Setting up time properly? Local time zone
must be set--see zic manu
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 18:40:36 +0000

Spider,
NOTE: Even though the machine is dual-boot for the sake of these
problems I am purposely NOT going into Windows. This problem is Linux
only.

I dual boot and windows shows correct local time.

1) I have tried a 2.6.6 generic kernel and a 2.6.8 gentoo-dev-sources
kernel and gotten the same results.

Ditto for linux-2.6.9-rc1-mm1. I also got the latest coreutils.

2) I have set system BIOS time to my local time.
5) I boot and run rdate to set my system clock time since BIOS time
isn't getting picked up. I then write system time back to the hardware

my BIOS time is picked up correctly

CLOCK="local"
10) uname -a says

Linux dencar 2.6.9-rc1-mm1 #2 Fri Aug 27 17:53:23 UTC 2004 i686 AMD
Athlon(tm) XP 2800+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
note it is showing the correct local time I've set, but is calling it UTC.

Thanks in advance for reading through all of this and sharing your
experience. I'm beginning to think that the kernel's support for this
new ATI chipset may not work correctly.
Cheers,
Mark

I have an ATI 9700 pro in my desktop. The clock has always worked
correctly in local time until about 2 weeks ago.
I had a look at a Mandrake machine last night and noticed that the
entries in /usr/share/zoneinfo were small scripts, including reference
to EST (eastern standard(Australian) time). Those in Gentoo say just
TZif. I wonder where the scripts are?
How to get the clock to local time again, Spider? Hope you can help.

Just a wwag (way wild ass guess): does your cmos battery need replacing?
--
/\/\
( CR ) Collins Richey
\/\/ Grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway,
the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight
to tell the difference.



--
gentoo-***@gentoo.org mailing list

[Dennis Robertson]

Post by Collins Richey
Just a wwag (way wild ass guess): does your cmos battery need replacing?

Collins,
I hope not; my system is only 1yo. Time is correct in windows as well.
Surely it can't just be coincidence that so many are having
clock-setting problems at present.

[Mark Knecht]

Post by Dennis Robertson

Post by Collins Richey
Just a wwag (way wild ass guess): does your cmos battery need replacing?

Collins,
I hope not; my system is only 1yo. Time is correct in windows as well.
Surely it can't just be coincidence that so many are having
clock-setting problems at present.

In my case it's most certainly not the battery:

1) As I said early on, I can boot into Windows day after day and it
comes up with the right time.

2) If I'm booting into Linux, I can stop, look at BIOS and see that BIOS
has the right time.

What's really strange (in my case) is that when I reboot Gentoo after
being powered down for a while then time that comes up in 'hwclock' is
the time I shutdown the system. It's like Gentoo write this info to a
file and then rereads that file when starting up, activing like it never
uses the real CMOS clock in the chipset.

- Mark

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[Holly Bostick]

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Dennis Robertson

Post by Collins Richey
Just a wwag (way wild ass guess): does your cmos battery need replacing?

Collins,
I hope not; my system is only 1yo. Time is correct in windows as well.
Surely it can't just be coincidence that so many are having
clock-setting problems at present.

1) As I said early on, I can boot into Windows day after day and it
comes up with the right time.
2) If I'm booting into Linux, I can stop, look at BIOS and see that BIOS
has the right time.
What's really strange (in my case) is that when I reboot Gentoo after
being powered down for a while then time that comes up in 'hwclock' is
the time I shutdown the system. It's like Gentoo write this info to a
file and then rereads that file when starting up, activing like it never
uses the real CMOS clock in the chipset.

Yes, that's almost exactly what it does, except it's not a file, it's
the BIOS. Have you not looked at your shutdown messages? If you did you
would see "Syncing local clock to hardware clock", the reverse of what
is done on startup.

Every Linux distro I've ever used did this, and it can really be a
problem if your time is set wrong in Linux (because that incorrect time
will be synced back to the BIOS, and then synced back to any OS when it
is booted.

My solution was to set up npt, so that my clock would be synced to a
time server, and thus would always be right when synced back to the BIOS.

Holly

Post by Mark Knecht
- Mark
--

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[Mark Knecht]

On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 10:21, Holly Bostick wrote:
<SNIP>

Post by Holly Bostick

Post by Mark Knecht
What's really strange (in my case) is that when I reboot Gentoo after
being powered down for a while then time that comes up in 'hwclock' is
the time I shutdown the system. It's like Gentoo write this info to a
file and then rereads that file when starting up, activing like it never
uses the real CMOS clock in the chipset.

Yes, that's almost exactly what it does, except it's not a file, it's
the BIOS. Have you not looked at your shutdown messages? If you did you
would see "Syncing local clock to hardware clock", the reverse of what
is done on startup.

Yep. The messages are there, but they are not talking to the hardware.
It just doesn't work on this machine. Works fine on all my other
machines. (2 other Gentoo, one Redhat)

Post by Holly Bostick
Every Linux distro I've ever used did this, and it can really be a
problem if your time is set wrong in Linux (because that incorrect time
will be synced back to the BIOS, and then synced back to any OS when it
is booted.

Yep, I agree. I think that what's going on here is that this is a fairly
new chipset from ATI and that the RTC drivers are probably not talking
to it corretly. Just my guess being a chip designer who used to do
chipsets...

Post by Holly Bostick
My solution was to set up npt, so that my clock would be synced to a
time server, and thus would always be right when synced back to the BIOS.

This works for me, but only when time is 'reasonably' close. If time is
off by less than 5 minutes or so then ntp seems to work. when it's off
by 8 hours (shut down at night boot up in morning) then ntp wouldn't
sync for me...

Thanks Holly!

- Mark

Post by Holly Bostick
Holly

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[Duncan]

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Holly Bostick
My solution was to set up npt, so that my clock would be synced to a
time server, and thus would always be right when synced back to the BIOS.

This works for me, but only when time is 'reasonably' close. If time is
off by less than 5 minutes or so then ntp seems to work. when it's off
by 8 hours (shut down at night boot up in morning) then ntp wouldn't
sync for me...

Try adding ntp-client to your default runlevel along with ntp. It will
run b4 ntp, and sync the clock to something reasonable, after which ntp
will run to adjust the few additional milliseconds and then keep things
synced.

If your system clock is fairly accurate on its own over a day, since
you shut down each nite, that single-shot ntp-client call at boot should
sync you close enough, and you may not need the additional overhead of the
ntp service running all the time.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin



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[Andrew Farmer]

On 30 Aug 2004, at 15:23, Mark Knecht wrote:
<snip>

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Holly Bostick
My solution was to set up npt, so that my clock would be synced to a
time server, and thus would always be right when synced back to the BIOS.

This works for me, but only when time is 'reasonably' close. If time is
off by less than 5 minutes or so then ntp seems to work. when it's off
by 8 hours (shut down at night boot up in morning) then ntp wouldn't
sync for me...

You could use ntpdate to do an initial one-shot time sync.

[Marvin J. Kosmal]

Post by Andrew Farmer
<snip>

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Holly Bostick
My solution was to set up npt, so that my clock would be synced to a
time server, and thus would always be right when synced back to the BIOS.

This works for me, but only when time is 'reasonably' close. If time is
off by less than 5 minutes or so then ntp seems to work. when it's off
by 8 hours (shut down at night boot up in morning) then ntp wouldn't
sync for me...

You could use ntpdate to do an initial one-shot time sync.

or rdate



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[Mark Knecht]

Post by Marvin J. Kosmal

Post by Andrew Farmer
<snip>

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Holly Bostick
My solution was to set up npt, so that my clock would be synced to a
time server, and thus would always be right when synced back to the BIOS.

This works for me, but only when time is 'reasonably' close. If time is
off by less than 5 minutes or so then ntp seems to work. when it's off
by 8 hours (shut down at night boot up in morning) then ntp wouldn't
sync for me...

You could use ntpdate to do an initial one-shot time sync.

or rdate

Yes, I'm using rdate right now, but this requires that I shell to root
which is no fun. Possibly I could do this in some init script but I'm
not that advanced a user and figure it's going to get lost in some
portage/baselayou update anyway.

What I'd really like is for the machine to operate as advertized and use
the silly BIOS clock each time I power up.

Using Duncan's idea to add ntp-client I seem to have managed to get the
right time after powering down for 5 minutes and then rebooting, so this
is a positive occurance, but still the problem is there and it would be
good for others to get it fixed. (Or so I think...)

I also tried an experiment where I set system time to August of next
year and then used hwclock --systohc to write BIOS. This actually
worked. However I then rest time within BIOS, booted up again and the
machine came up with the time it saved and not the time in BIOS, so the
problem is when booting and reading, not when shutting down and saving,
or so I think again. ;-)

This has been going on long enough (2 weeks at least) with great help
and ideas from the group, but unfortunately no identification of what
the real problem is on this machine. Thanks to everyone who has helped
with ideas. I'm going to go ahead and file a bug report and see if a
developer somewhere will help me find the error of my, or my machine's,
ways.

thanks,
Mark

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[Dennis Robertson]

Post by Mark Knecht
This has been going on long enough (2 weeks at least) with great help
and ideas from the group, but unfortunately no identification of what
the real problem is on this machine. Thanks to everyone who has helped
with ideas. I'm going to go ahead and file a bug report and see if a
developer somewhere will help me find the error of my, or my machine's,
ways.

And mine too, hopefully. Thanks