[comp.sys.hp] time daemon program needed

greg@umbc5.umbc.edu (Greg Sylvain) (10/04/89)

	Hi, I currently work in an environment that consists of several HP work stations placed all around campus, all of with are on the net.  And they are all running X11R3, with the xdm window login prompt.  (This is just a daemon the puts up a nice login prompt in the middle of the screen, and blanks the screen after a while.)  And they keep their own times, and after a while the time gets too far off for xdm and the Xserver to talk (xdm keeps its own S/W representation of the time).  And each time xdm wakes 







up and can't connect to the X server (the server sleeps according to the system clock), xdm fires off a new server.  Unfortunately, the original server is still running and still has the socket locked, so the new X server can't connect to the socket.  Well this goes on and you can imageine what happens.  Eventually the machine is brought to its knees, with a full process table.

	So I was wondering if there is or if anyone is working on a time daemon program to get the time from a central computer, and reset its clock.  Any one have one out there ??

		Thanks for any help,
		greg
		Systems Programmer
		University of Maryland Baltimore County

rer@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Rob Robason) (10/13/89)

> 	So I was wondering if there is or if anyone is working on a time
> 	daemon program to get the time from a central computer, and
> 	reset its clock.  Any one have one out there ??

Sorry the news is bad.  There is a common 'timed' program available on
BSD systems which syncronizes time, but we don't yet support it.  The
thing you want to do is justifiable enough, but if you use the system
calls you have available (settimeofday), there is a risk that a large
shift in time will throw off tools such as cron and make, especially if
you move time backward.  The BSD adjtime call allows gradual changes in
time without these side effects, but HP-UX doesn't have this yet.

Be cautious of any contributed software you find because it may do funny
things to your system.  Anything you get should take precautions against
gross time changes.  I'm sorry I can't tell you that there is a ready
solution.

Rob Robason