RX2600 and requesting the time on a reboot.

[Brian Reiter]

Hi Folks,

We have a number of RX2600s (OpenVMS 8-3.1H1, Update 6) deployed, all of which are going to request the current time should a reboot occur. We don't have (and likely never will) have a support contract and hence unable to patch the machines to prevent the issue.

is there anyway around this problem without patching?

Does the problem exist in OpenVMS 8-4?

Regards

Brian Reiter

[Volker Halle]

 Brian,

as far as I recall, there is an article in the HP Support database describing this problem, but you can only view this article with the appropriate warrantly/contract status.

You could use the SYSGEN parameter TIMEPROMPTWAIT and set it to a small positive number (less than 32768). This will cause SYSINIT to wait that many seconds, if a correct time value could not be read from the hardware clock. If that timeout expires, the system will continue to boot using the time of the last boot as the system time.

You could then (in SYLOGICALS.COM or SYCONFIG.COM) check the modification date of SYS$ERRORLOG:ERRLOG.SYS (this file is getting written to at least every 10 minutes, while the system is up) and at least update the local time to that value plus a couple of minutes. Later during startup, you could then try to obtain a valid date/time using NTPDATE from some NTP server near you.

Volker.

[Antoniov.]

This problem requires a patch for OpenVMS V8.3. If you upgrade to V8.4 you solve it.

I had some rx2600 and rx2620 with same trouble
.

[Volker Halle]

Antonio,

if you have confirmed and verified information, that a patch for OpenVMS I64 V8.3 really 'solves' this problem, please provide the explicit patch name. Ideally with an excerpt from the patch release notes.

Just applying any patch with a more recent SYS$BASE_IMAGE may not really 'solve' the problem, but may just extend the 5-year limit into the future.

Volker.