[gentoo-amd64] Re: hardware clock often doesn't sync to system on shutdown

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Thanasis <thanasis@asyr.hopto.org> posted 48CFB464.8030008@asyr.hopto.org,
excerpted below, on  Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:28:04 +0300:

> Do you think it might cause any problems, to /dev/null maybe?

I'm not sure how it's handled in this case, but the ones that cause 
problems redirecting to /dev/null are I believe the ones that rewrite by 
writing a temp version, then mv-ing it over the old one.  In fact, some 
of those won't work with symlinks for much the same reason.

Of course, if it's trying to do that as a normal user, it won't work, but 
if it's doing that as root (as likely here) it can cause problems.  I've 
had it happen a couple times to me...

So I'd try starting and stopping clock a time or two and then check /dev/
null to see if it's still fine.  But make sure you either have a copy of 
the device node or know how to create one, before you do.  If you're 
using udev, you should have a copy of both the null and console device 
nodes either in the /dev on / before udev mounts over it (so you can 
access it by doing a mount --bind... I have an fstab entry for just that, 
to make doing backups of the / filesystem easier), or in your initramfs/
initrd, or both.

-- 
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
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