[CentOS] curious reboot output

Sun Jan 23 18:51:29 UTC 2011
Keith Roberts <keith at karsites.net>

On Sun, 23 Jan 2011, Robert Heller wrote:

> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
> From: Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] curious reboot output
> 
> At Sat, 22 Jan 2011 19:49:18 -0800 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 7:06 PM, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:
>>> At Sat, 22 Jan 2011 21:40:57 -0500 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hello list!
>>>>
>>>> ??I was just curious about the output of a command I typed.
>>>>
>>>> [root at LCENT02:~] #last reboot | head -1
>>>> reboot ?? system boot ??2.6.18-194.26.1. Wed Dec 29 20:03 ?? ?? ?? ?? (24+01:33)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> This is odd because this machine was rebuilt today (Saturday 1/22) in
>>>> mid afternoon. Just curious how the output of this command could NOT
>>>> know this?
>>>
>>> What was the hw clock set to on reboot?
>>>
>>
>> When it's almost a month off, is this really relevant?  I could see a
>> timezone discrepancy making this relevant, maybe, but not three weeks.
>
> Unless the hardware clock was off for some reason (dead/weak BIOS
> battery?).  If you are running ntpd, it will sync up pretty quick, but
> if the clock is wrong at boot time, that is what will be recorded in the
> last database.

I replaced my M/B BIOS battery recently (amongst other 
things), and forgot to reset the BIOS date and time. When I 
restarted the machine fsck had a wobbly turn, about the 
filesystems not being checked since ~1970!

So every partition got checked for no real reason!

Learnt my lesson there!

Kind Regards,

Keith

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