[HECnet] SimH, Ultrix and DECnet

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-06-28 15:45, Peter Coghlan wrote:

It is triggered by the setting of the todr at boot time. In principle,
it picks the mtime of / to get a rough estimate of what time it is at
boot time. It's done in inittodr, which is called from ufs_mount.
inittodr checks if the date is before 1975, and if it is, the it's
preposterous.


I've booted both VMS and OSF/1 or Tru64 or Digital Unix or whatever it is
called this week on the same Alphaserver 2100. The oses use the TOY clock
differently unfortunately.

When VMS notices that the time is "preposterous" is prompts me to enter the
correct date and time before allowing the machine to boot. Unix gives me the
"preposterous" message and advises me to fix the clock later while going on to
boot and put "preposterous" dates on various files :-( The VMS approach can
also be somewhat inconvenient when trying to do "lights out" operations.

A pity that a standard way of using the TOY clock could not have been agreed
for all the oses supported on a particular processor.

Note that Ultrix does not output the "preposterous" error message for any value in the todr. It's based on a date in the file system.

However, I agree that it's a shame that Ultrix and VMS is not compatible in their use of the todr. However, it would be extremely hard to do, since VMS keeps the todr in local time, while Ultrix keeps it in UTC.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol