How to force prompt to enter current time, at system startup?

[Art Wiens]

OpenVMS v6.2 (VAX emulated by CHARON-VAX).

Is there a boot flag or some other manual intervention that will require the current time to be entered when VMS is booting (like Standalone Backup always does)?

I have an email in to SRI about possibly deleting CHARON.DAT (where the TOY clock is kept), but I'm not sure that's a good idea (I thought of it ;-) I believe other items such as default boot device are also in that file.

Cheers,
Art

[Ian Miller.]

Set the system parameter SETTIME to 1 and the system will ask for the datetime on every boot.

[John Gillings]

Art,

See also TIMEPROMPTWAIT - depending on the setting I think it can override SETTIME (ie: if TIMEPROMPTWAIT=0?)

You also have the fun of working out what a uFortnight is :-)

[Ian Miller.]

The help for TIMEPROMPTWAIT is educational.

"The time unit of micro-fortnights is approximated as seconds in the implementation"

and a discussion if what happens if the value is 32768 or more.

[Volker Halle]

Art,

you need to set SETTIME = 1 and TIMEPROMPTWAIT to a 'negative' value (i.e. 32768 through 65535). This combination will cause SYSINIT to prompt forever, until a valid time has been entered. This will (most likely) not work in a cluster, as the system time is taken from another node in the cluster.

Deleting CHARON.DAT is not such a good idea, as it also stores the 'NVRAM' parameters (like boot device, root, HALT settings). But deleting that file WILL cause OpenVMS to ask for the time during boot.

Volker.