hwclock and local time on Windows machines

[garaden]

I've been having some interesting issues with the Windows convention of setting the hardware clock to local time. Knoppix seems to expect that the hardware clock will always be set to UTC and it seems that all the time zone-related cheatcodes are based around this assumption (they simply offset the hardware clock the appropriate amount). Normally this isn't a big deal: Knoppix just assumes that the hwclock and time zone are both UTC (even though they're both US/Eastern) and they all lived happily ever after.

Not Tor, though. The combination of a UTC timezone and a hardware clock set to local time freaks Tor out to no end, and makes it unable to communicate properly with the network. Setting the time properly (or installing NTP or something) handles this issue nicely, but... now Windows thinks the clock is four hours off!

I think I've tracked this issue to /usr/share/initscripts/default.rcS, where a setting of UTC=yes is requiring the OS to treat the hardware clock as UTC. This setting is "no" on my Ubuntu installation that dual-boots with Windows, and it treats the hardware clock properly. Does anyone know of a cheatcode that can change this value on the fly? I might try setting it to "no", then using the utc cheatcode in combination with tz and see what the results are sometime later.

[garaden]

Ok, turns out /usr/share/initscripts/default.rcS is actually a reference file of the default values (which I guess was changed at installation, in Ubuntu's case). /etc/default/rcS is the actual configuration file. And it looks like it worked! I changed UTC to equal "no" and made sure I entered an appropriate time zone when I booted (I use EST5EDT), and everyone was happy, including Tor.

Two problems though: first of all, boot is a little slower if you use the tz cheatcode with a persistent image (probably has something to do with access times), regardless of the value of UTC in /etc/default/rcS. The other problem is that there is now no simple way to get the old behavior back short of editing the file again and then rebooting (the utc cheatcode only changes the time zone).

Other than that, this seems to be the best way to get Knoppix to handle hardware clocks set by Windows.

[krishna.murphy]

Ok, turns out /usr/share/initscripts/default.rcS is actually a reference file of the default values (which I guess was changed at installation, in Ubuntu's case). /etc/default/rcS is the actual configuration file. And it looks like it worked! I changed UTC to equal "no" and made sure I entered an appropriate time zone when I booted (I use EST5EDT), and everyone was happy, including Tor.

Two problems though: first of all, boot is a little slower if you use the tz cheatcode with a persistent image (probably has something to do with access times), regardless of the value of UTC in /etc/default/rcS. The other problem is that there is now no simple way to get the old behavior back short of editing the file again and then rebooting (the utc cheatcode only changes the time zone).

Other than that, this seems to be the best way to get Knoppix to handle hardware clocks set by Windows.

Thanks! That worked well for me, too. The only trick I can add is to edit it with the following in the terminal window:

sudo leafpad /etc/default/rcS

Cheers!
Krishna