Time / date issues

[John Klos <john%klos.com@localhost>]

> > > Btw: I had several mails dating to 1.1.1970 in my inbox. Leading also
> > > to wrong sorting.
> > 
> > Thats either
> > 
> > - NetBSD/Amiga on anything-but-DraCo Y2K problem, on a machine installed 
> >   since January first
> > - somebody without battery clock on a freshly installed machine, who didn't
> >   set the date manually, either.
> 
> Of course: or somebody on a machine without a battery clock.

As I haven't rebooted since 1999, this problem hasn't affected me, but I
have two suggestions for those with Amigas:

1) The batteries on the motherboards die and leak. The acid can kill your
motherboard. Go out to Radio Shack (or the local electronic store) and get
a battery holder that takes 4 AA batteries. Also get a simple diode (50
piv is fine). Buy three (if you can; they usually come in packs of two) or 
four lithium AA batteries, such as Eveready. Solder the diode across where
one of the batteries would be in the battery holder, and wire the whole
thing to the contacts on the motherboard after carefully taking out the
old battery. You might want to extend the wires so you can mount the
battery holder where it won't block slots or a CyberVision PPC. Mine are
against the front wall, above the CPU/accelerator slot.

I have done this on three A4000s and one A3000; because the clock chip
takes so little current, the shelf life of the battery is the limiting
factor. With lithium AAs, you likely won't need to worry about them until
well after 2010.

2) If you don't want to solder, or you've done the safe thing of just
taking out the battery, or you haven't built a new kernel yet (I'm sure
there are a few 14 mhz '030s running on 16 bit ram out there), make sure
you run ntpdate as soon as an Internet connection is established. If you
have more than one machine on your local network, but no full-time
Internet connection, you can run xntpd on one machine where the time is
set and run ntpdate on the other whenever it boots.

For those who would like ntpdate, but don't want to compile the xntpd
package, get: (I'm not sure if NetBSD comes with it, but to be sure)
http://www.sixgirls.org/netbsd/ntpdate.tar.gz

For those running AmigaOS and want ntpdate, get:
http://www.sixgirls.org/amiga/ntpdate.lha
This was from ntpsync, but renamed ntpdate to be consistent.

If you can deal with the imprecision of the lag between you and the
northeast of the US, you're welcome to use my server as a time server
(it's a Stratum 2 server):
ntpdate -v reva.sixgirls.org

Or pick your own time server.

I hope this is helpful to some of you out there!

John Klos