Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!toro!nick
From: nick@toro.UUCP (Nicholas Jacobs)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ncr
Subject: Re: startup menu and changing the system time/date
Message-ID: <1273@toro.UUCP>
Date: 13 Feb 90 00:50:20 GMT
References: <2290@texbell.swbt.com> <213@harald.UUCP> <1879@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM>
Reply-To: nick@toro.UUCP (Nicholas Jacobs)
Organization: Merrill Lynch Municipal Securities Systems Development, NY
Lines: 29

In article <1879@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM> mercer@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM (Dan Mercer) writes:
>As for changing the date,  log in as root (in single user mode is
>preferable,  or you may confuse running programs),  and
>enter:
>
>date 0209143290 
>
>for instance to set the date to Feb 9, 1990 2:32 PM
>
>Dan Mercer

In particular, I recommend that you do not do this while cron is running.
You can end up with running jobs twice if you change the time when cron
is within a certain window N of running a job (people will source code will
presumably be able to determine this N) and you set the time ahead by N
minutes. It seems like an alarm in cron goes off to run a job and then it
ends up rescheduling the job again (granted my analysis is probably less than
completely correct, but this is what I've seen!).

However, I have reset the clock in multiuser mode with no ill effect
once I killed cron.

(Don't forget to restart cron :-)).

Nicholas Jacobs
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