maillist archive/system clock

[Mitchell Roth <ffmgr@xxxxxxx>]

I'm not sure if anyone other than me noticed that messages to the list were
being archived in somewhat random order.  The cause turned out to be a system 
time problem.  When the LUG servers were shutdown 3 weeks ago for the power
outages, linux0, which maintains the archive, lost its hardware clock and
came back up in the year 2000.  Subsequent messages to the list were prepended
to the beginning of the current archive.  I noticed the system time problem
last week and corrected the system clock with 'date', but when I rebooted
it went back to the year 2000 again.  I asked Seth for help and he turned
out to be at a wedding (his) in Kazakhstan.  In true LUG spirit he reminded
me that I should have used 'hwclock' to reset the hardware clock as well
as the system clock.  Having done that, linux0 now has the correct, or close
to correct, time on both clocks and the new messages to the list are again
being appended to the end of the archive.  The moral to the story is that
linux0 needs a new clock battery.  Not too surprising since the servers are
going on 4 years old.
Mitch

Dr. Mitchell Roth
Professor of Computer Science
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Fairbanks, AK 99775
roth@cs.uaf.edu
http://www.cs.uaf.edu/~roth
work: 907-474-7098
cell: 907-590-6099
fax:  907-474-5394