Scott’s Weblog

Quagga and hwclock

May 11th, 2005

Turns out the reason for seeing my default gateway go missing all the time was that the clocks weren’t set right. For example, node1 has the correct date/time, but node2 is still set at 1980. Quagga sees LSA’s from the opposite node and figures that they are “too old” and so discards them. The reason that node2 has the wrong time set is because during the Soekris install proedure, the hwclock is not written to with the correct time. The only time the hwclock gets updated is during a proper shutdown, which, on a Soekris, sometimes never happens. So, we need to make sure that each time we create a new Soekris, we get the right time with ntpdate, and then run hwclock -w to make sure it’s written to the hwclock, so that next time you boot up without network access (as most nodes will) we get the correct date and time and Quagga can do it’s routing magic properly.

Entry Filed under: 420 General