On 7 February 2015 at 16:49, Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk wrote:
Do you actually need the RTC ? Could you rely on NTP to set the time if the devices are on all a network ?
Network can't be relied upon so unfortunately RTC is required.
Just wondering if there is a kernel boot flag to ignore the RTC, or if you could but a script in init.d to run before the network scripts which resets the RTC with hwclock to a clean state (even if it is the wrong time) ?
Just thinking about it, I wonder whether simply putting: hwclock --systohc .. into init.d would suffice? By that point the kernel should have a time (whether it's correct or not is largely moot, but if the hwclock is accurate then it should (I assume?) have been read long before this), so hwclock would thereafter be a non-corrupt (albeit not necessarily accurate) value. That should prevent the DHCP issue.
It does mean it needs to occur before DHCP though, so maybe /etc/network/if-pre-up.d would be a better place?
Can anyone think of a downside to this?