[ale] Time to System Bios

[Michael H. Warfield]

Bob Kruger enscribed thusly:

> One of the few things that I like about DOS was with the "time" and "date"
> utilities and their ability to actually alter the time in the ROM bios from
> the command line.

> I know that I can use date, ntpdate, rdate, etc to change the system clock.
>  I have not found a way yet to change the date stored in the ROM bios.  Is
> there a way to do this from Linux?

	"man clock"

	The following command will write the current system time out
to the clock chip:

	/sbin/clock -w

	It not in the ROM bios, it's actually in a battery powered
real time clock chip and cmos memory.

	Just running /sbin/clock will read the clock chip and set the system
time to it.

	Note:  This is on RedHat (all versions).  There are some other
utilities for this and some other distributions use other commands.

> My goal is to have a self sustaining timekeeper on the network that, even
> in the event of a long power loss, can start back up being relatively close
> on time.  The system serving as the LAN time keeper uses a modem a couple
> of times a day to dial out, synchronize with a tier 2 timeserver on the
> 'net, and is then available for other systems to adjust from.  Being
> accurate to the second is not important, but as all PC clocks have a
> tendency to drift, being able to save the current setting to the ROM bios
> so that a restart will not result in a time server that is hours off would
> be most helpful.

	All of your systems should write the current date and time back
to CMOS if it can sync up with ntpdate prior to starting xntpd.  Keeps
the timewarping to a minimum, even when using xntp.

> Thanks in advance for any assistance.

> Regarfds - Bob


	Mike
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