How To Guide How to configure the distribution Setting the date and time

Setting the date and time

It is recommended that the target Linux system is initialized with the correct date and time. Some utilities can behave strangely if the date is wrong, and there can be conflicts if the NFS server for the root file system has a significantly different time to the target system.

Most systems have a local time server, which provides the time on request. This often has a local DNS alias with a name such as timehost. Contact your local system administrator if this is not the case. To verify that a time server is running, enter the command:

host% rdate -p timehost
Wed Sep 14 10:55:51 2005

This shows the time on the time server timehost. To have the target board set its time from the time server on boot, create a file S99time.sh in the target directory /etc/rc.d/rcS.d (for example /export/rootfs/<user>/etc/rc.d/rcS.d/S99time.sh) with the contents:

echo running rdate -s timehost ...
rdate -s timehost