On Tuesday 27 Sep 2011, Camaleón wrote: > On Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:11:33 +0100, David Goodenough wrote: > > I have some small single board systems on which I run Debian. They have > > clocks, but they are not battery backed and so reset to zero for each > > run. > > You mean that system always starts with no date set? :-o Absolutely yes, that is my problem. No battery backup for the time when the box is powered down, so on boot the time is always the 1st Jan 1970 00:00am. > > > I then set the time using NTP once I have a network connection - > > wireless as it happens and therefore not entirely predictable in how > > quickly it will connect. > > Mmm... I would be careful with this, NTP may refuse to sync if the offset > between current/real date and system date is too wide. by NTP I mean using the NTP protocols, I use ntpdate which does not suffer from this problem. > > > I would like to make sure that cron (and I am quite happy to looks at > > other crons if that makes like easy) does not use an unset clock as the > > basis for firing commands. > > There are also "/etc/cron.hourly|daily|weekly" folders where you can put > your scripts which will be run by cron at no "specific" time, not sure if > this can be useful to your purpose or you seek instead for a system wide > solution to your timing issues. > > > I could use update-rc.d to disable cron, and only enable it once > > wpa_supplicant has established the connection, but then what if the > > wireless link goes down and back up while the hardware is powered up, in > > which case it would get restarted unnecessarily. > > > > Does anyone know if there is a way to tell and of the crons to ignore > > unset times? > > Having a system configured with bad time may experience stability issues > as most of the base scripts rely on the right time to run their jobs by > means of cron and/or other scheduler daemons. which is why I want to disable the cron type activities until I have set the time/date to a real one.
David > > Greetings, -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201109281008.27811.david.goodeno...@btconnect.com
