On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:25:00PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> >
> > I'm in UTC+2; since there is a time difference of approximately two
> > hours (modulo a few seconds -- it certainly took me more than five
> > seconds to find the power cord and boot the system again), I guess that
> > makes it clear that something somewhere is confused about timezones.
>
> This also makes it clear why Ted (being on a negative UTC offset)
> doesn't see this: His timestamp is always in the past, not in the
> future as ours.
>
> Additionally, this check is a severe nuisance for me. I frequently
> hack around with rescue systems and do not bother with time zones
> while just fixing a single file. Therefore, I expect that all times
> may be two hours late or fast after such an operation, and having a
> head- and consoleless system hang on boot just because of such an
> issue is a grave issue.
>
> I think that this timestamp check is too picky and should be removed
> completely or relaxed in a way that it does only return a non-zero
> exit code if the difference is more than could be explained by a
> timezone issue.
There is an easy fix for this, which used to be installed by default
on Ubuntu (but not on Debian systems, where this hasn't been a
problem). This was an automatic installation of the following in
/etc/e2fsck.conf:
[options]
buggy_init_scripts = 1
This was removed in Karmic because it was believed that all of the
issues around making sure the time was properly set before the root
filesystem was checked (and I suspect in some other distributions they
actually set the timezone in their initrd *before* they mount the root
filesystems), which also avoided the problem that I fixed in the
kernel patch for ext3/4.
But if you're really annoyed and you think it's "too picky" to make
sure the time zones are set correctly in early boot, there is an easy
work around. Just set "buggy_init_scripts=1". This was the way
things were in 9.04 and for the last few years, which I added about
2-3 years ago when I was tired about Ubuntu users (and apparently,
only Ubuntu users) were complaining to me about this problem.
- Ted
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
