Unbelievable time handling bug


Tor

Active Member
Joined
Oct 3, 2008
Messages
709
Ok DST changed last night. So what do I see on my Pandora?


WRONG TIME! And not only is the local time one hour wrong, it's much worse: 'date -u' now shows that the clock, which shall always be UTC, has somehow been moved one hour!


What's going on here? Has somebody tried to wrestle the setup to mimic Windows' buggy behaviour of old?


In case this isn't clear:


1) The hardware clock shall always run at UTC (aka GMT if you wish)


2) /etc/localtime shall be a symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/<your-timezone>, in my case Europe/Paris, which it in fact is. (For me, it just has to be something that is == MET, and most European cities will do.)


3) Alternatively, but less preferred, /etc/localtime could be a copy. Symlink is better. Which it is.


That's all. Linux handles it all from there. And, as 1) and 2) are actually correctly set up on my Pandora, how can it even be possible that my hardware clock is now 1 hour wrong? And my localtime too, of course, as the /etc/localtime setup is correct.


Update: Please note that I booted my Pandora from shut-off this morning. So whatever took place to utterly abuse the hardware clock may have taken place in some startup script. I don't have the means to log in remotely to peek around at the moment and working locally is tricky with the keyboard because I'm in a room with overhead lights.
 
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What hotfix are you on, and are you absolutely certain that your /etc/localtime is a symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Paris?


ED didn't fully understand how the localtime worked when he built up the original time script. It wasn't until the 4th hotfix, I think, that he fixed it. It used to set the hardware clock to the localtime and do some very odd things. There may be some hold-over from that if all you did was upgrade. That's the only thing I can think of at the moment.
 
I'm at the latest hotfix (final 6), full reflash, and I checked the symlink directly on the Pandora in a term window. I also checked with both date -u that the OS clock was now wrong, and I used hwclock to check the hardware clock - also wrong.
 
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