exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Okay, I've got a Mega ST4 setup that runs my BBS. It's got 4 megs, AdSpeed accelerator,
Cloudy TOS board, and a Lightning ST board. TOS version is 2.06. The Mega ST has its own
real time clock with battery backup.

Something happened that I'm pretty sure that I've never had happen before, or on any
other Atari I've used.

The time/date changed itself...

I received messages from some of DarkForce's users that they were being kicked off almost
immediately after they logged in (time exceeded). Apparently BBS Express! ST was going by
the bogus date and marking everyone as time exceeded and booting them.

So I stop Express and look at the CALLER.LOG file and the "Who's Called Lately" screen. In the
log, the timestamp for one caller before midnight on the day in question is correct, but the next
caller after midnight has jumped (dropped?) to April of 1939.

1939?

Express gets its time/date from the system clock on the ST. At first, I just thought that Express
had done something funky and misinterpreted the date from the Mega ST. So I went to the
Control Panel and checked it. Oh boy - it's showing April of 1939! What the heck...

I reset it, rebooted, rechecked it, still accurate and restarted the BBS. It's working fine at the
moment but as I said, I've never had any ST do that before and am at a loss as to figure out
why it did it or what caused it?

Anyone every have this happen to them? Thanks...

PS I'm attaching a screenshot taken from the BBS. You can see the correct date as "1/20/<2" then
the (very) incorrect date of 04/02/=9. Keep in mind, Express is not Y2k compliant so it shows the
first digit in the year as a symbol/character. So <2 is 22 and =9 is 39. That's a known issue that
has been around for a long time and has nothing to do with this...

PPS I just noticed, according to that picture, the times are all over the place...

This isn't that Y2K fix thing is it ? Did it start screwing up after xmas ? When I saw crazy things going on like those times, it was when the RTC was set to the wrong encoding system. I don't know much about all the MEGA or cloudy RTC stuff, but maybe there is some Initialise up somewhere where you can things up again the time and date and see what happens ?

exxos wrote: 20 Jan 2022 18:35 This isn't that Y2K fix thing is it ? Did it start screwing up after xmas ? When I saw crazy things going on like those times, it was when the RTC was set to the wrong encoding system. I don't know much about all the MEGA or cloudy RTC stuff, but maybe there is some Initialise up somewhere where you can things up again the time and date and see what happens ?

Hey Chris. I'm not using any Y2K patches as the Mega ST has a battery backed RTC already.

The Cloudy TOS switcher board and the Lightning ST don't have an RTC in them, the STorm ST
board does. I'm not using the STorm ST board with this machine, so I'm at a loss to explain this.

Gremlins maybe? (or should I say GEMlins?)... :lol:

I just powered up my Mega4 to see if the time was good, and It's reading the correct time/date for today when checking using Sysinfo. Date/time was set using control panel.

RTC is a Ricoh RP5C15 BTW. I suspect your BBS software has had a glitch, what does the RTC read now?

rubber_jonnie wrote: 21 Jan 2022 11:07 I just powered up my Mega4 to see if the time was good, and It's reading the correct time/date for today when checking using Sysinfo. Date/time was set using control panel.

RTC is a Ricoh RP5C15 BTW. I suspect your BBS software has had a glitch, what does the RTC read now?

Well, after that I reset the time in the Control Panel then rebooted to see what it would do.

Came up with the correct time/date. So...I've been running it since then and it seems to be
fine for now.

Guess I'll just keep an eye on it. :)

Thanks.

Darklord wrote: 21 Jan 2022 15:18

rubber_jonnie wrote: 21 Jan 2022 11:07 I just powered up my Mega4 to see if the time was good, and It's reading the correct time/date for today when checking using Sysinfo. Date/time was set using control panel.

RTC is a Ricoh RP5C15 BTW. I suspect your BBS software has had a glitch, what does the RTC read now?

Well, after that I reset the time in the Control Panel then rebooted to see what it would do.

Came up with the correct time/date. So...I've been running it since then and it seems to be
fine for now.

Guess I'll just keep an eye on it. :)

Thanks.

Fair enough. Out of curiosity did you have any power glitches at all that could have caused it to go funny?

rubber_jonnie wrote: 21 Jan 2022 15:23 Fair enough. Out of curiosity did you have any power glitches at all that could have caused it to go funny?

Not that I'm aware of. It is Eastern Kentucky though, where we have lots of thunderstorms in the spring +
summer, and heavy wet snow occasionally in the winter (and downed power lines). That's why I put a UPS
on the Mega ST4 running my BBS. I only have the Mega ST, hard drive enclosure, and Lantronix UDS-10 on
it. My tests show that with a complete power outage I can get about 35 minutes before the UPS fails as
well...

So theoretically no "short" power outage or glitch should affect it.

Which puts us back to square one and me keeping an eye on it. :)

Thanks.

Darklord wrote: 22 Jan 2022 02:04

rubber_jonnie wrote: 21 Jan 2022 15:23 Fair enough. Out of curiosity did you have any power glitches at all that could have caused it to go funny?

Not that I'm aware of. It is Eastern Kentucky though, where we have lots of thunderstorms in the spring +
summer, and heavy wet snow occasionally in the winter (and downed power lines). That's why I put a UPS
on the Mega ST4 running my BBS. I only have the Mega ST, hard drive enclosure, and Lantronix UDS-10 on
it. My tests show that with a complete power outage I can get about 35 minutes before the UPS fails as
well...

So theoretically no "short" power outage or glitch should affect it.

Which puts us back to square one and me keeping an eye on it. :)

Thanks.

Should be fine on a UPS, so definitely odd.

Perhaps it was due to the Tonga eruption...

Cosmic ray.