Hi all,

I have a situation and want some advice please. So basically we a batch scheduling system at work and we are implementing a full migration from one clients system which is on HP-UX to RHEL. This involves migrating 2500 shell scripts, setting up the scheduler and importing all these scripts.

Anyway, these scripts rely on a financial data feed which we cant provide in our SIT environment and can only have a "cut" of data from the client to run against the scripts. Problem is, these scripts need the data to be within 3 days old or the code wont complete. (Its a criteria for this finance data). So I have been asked if I can set the test box up with the system date set constantly on a certain date. ie. It will never change from 20140513.

Is that actually possible?

Would love to hear your suggestions on this.

Cheers

Sure, just schedule a cron job to run at 1 minute past midnight each day to run date -s and reset the date to whatever you want.

Just set the date not the whole date/time.

Unix-like systems have a history of sometimes reacting badly to large negative time shifts (timeouts that should be a few seconds don't trigger for a long time, etc.), so you might need to reboot with the BIOS date set to that certain date (and of course with NTP or other time synchronization tools disabled). Sometimes it works OK, just don't be too surprised if some parts of the system misbehave after you've set back the date on a running system.

I suppose a scripted reboot of the server could also be done as part of the date fudge.

Setting time on boot with a script may work. Not sure how this would affect your data however. Even changing date one time may cause some unexpected results.

At one time I explored a way to stop time (rtc) in order to get past some of these issues. It was a long time ago and may not be possible anymore.

Thanks so much for all your input.

Another questions is...

Would "hwclock" need to be looked at to? Would that need to be re-set along with using the "date" command?

Cheers

The hardware clock is only consulted during boot. You can certainly run "hwclock --systohc" after setting the date. Many (most?) distros do that during shutdown, so if you do find that a reboot is needed, setting the date and then rebooting should take care of it.

However you do it, you will of course be left with various files/filesystems with timestamps in the future. Working around or resetting those is left as an exercise for the student sysadmin.

An alternate way is to increment the dates in test data suite everyday. Needs good documentation and housekeeping procedures.

Possible?
Less bothersome?

OK

At one time one could change speed so that an hour was a week or such. It worked OK, not sure how to do that anymore.

Resetting the time can have serious consequences. What kind of scripts are these? How are they getting the date? Couldn't you modify the function(s) that provide the date to return a static date every time it's called? System wide date reset is probably best done through a cron job, and I feel it's a bad idea. I wouldn't do it.