Re: PHOTO-3D digest 1218

[wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bob Wier)]

|                            PHOTO-3D Digest 1218
|
|Topics covered in this issue include:
|
|  1) to Jim from Wolfie
|        by Wolfie! <werewolf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
|
|----------------------------------------------------------------------

Some of you may be wondering about the wildly varying lengths of the
digests over the past few days. The scoop is that since Feb 29th, we
seem to be having problems with the date routines on our machine.

The problem is that the date does not get set correctly
on reboot. Although it does roll over at midnight, when a reboot
takes place (which is every night about 4 am), the date is set back
one day. I didn't notice that until it had been March 6th for 3 days :-)

Thus sometime after that, we have to manually set it 24 hrs ahead.
When the listserver sees that, it think's it has not sent out a digest
for a day, and goes ahead with a distribution (it's set to send when
the size reaches 40K or so OR 24 hrs have passed).

We now have a temporary fix in by running NTP on boot, but that's only a
patch - it's disturbing that the date routines are broken - for you unix
types out there, it has major implications as far at AT, CRON, DUMP/VDUMP,
RESTORE/VRESTORE, and so forth.

Since we are on spring break, it likely will not be seriously addressed
until next week, so you'll have to give us some slack. Since this sort
of thing requires sitting at the system consol to debug (what with
shutdown/restarts/reboots, etc) we almost have to be running normal
hours and operator schedules.

If anyone has any suggestions on where to look for this problem (it's not
obvious - I've already checked our TZSET (time zone set) conf file and
it looks ok), please e-mail me direct at the address below. Bobcat is
a Dec Alpha 3000/600s running OSF/1 v2.0b.

THANKS!

--B.W.

_bob_wier_wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


--- wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ----




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