[OLPC-AU] [Testing] Testing summary, Auckland - 17 March 2012

[James Cameron]

On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 10:31:19PM +1300, Tabitha Roder wrote:
> XO-1.75 os30 testing for OLPC
> Discovered one reason for the erratic behavior of yum on XO 1.75.
> Bonnie fairly regularly looses the time (known problem in the B1
> prototypes), resetting to January 2000, when you use yum to get
> ntpdate to fix the time, yum fails with a cryptic message:
> 
> [olpc at xo-6d-6c-3a ~]$ sudo yum install ntpdate
> Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for
> repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try again
> 
> Using tcpdump and wireshark we find that the reason is that the
> certificate on mirrors.fedoraproject.com is not valid until some time
> after the year 2000. Maybe we should install ntpdate by default?

Yes, there is frequent need for ntpdate.  I would like to see it
installed too.  Meanwhile, I copy it in when I need it.

I suggest for the XO-1.75 B1 units you make a note to compensate for the
real-time clock failure after fs-update and before testing.

http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/11425 has several useful methods.  The
easiest might be for you to edit olpc.fth (e.g. using microemacs in
OpenFirmware, "ok emacs int:\boot\olpc.fth") and add a fixed valid
looking date set just before olpc-fth-boot-me:

	decimal 0 0 0 19 3 2012 " set-time" clock-node @ $call-method
	olpc-fth-boot-me

If you find the clock is only occasionally forgetful, then the code
could be expanded to check for incorrect year before setting the clock:

	: get-year  ( -- year )  time&date 2nip 2nip nip  ;

	decimal
	: silly-time ( -- s m h d m y )  0 0 0 19 3 2012  ;
	hex

	: set-clock  ( -- )
	   silly-time  " set-time" clock-node @ $call-method
        ;

	: ?fix-clock  ( -- )
	   get-year d# 2012 < if  silly-time set-clock  then
	;

	?fix-clock
	olpc-fth-boot-me

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/