>> I ran apt-get update on my etch system yesterday. It has been a while so
40+
>> packages showed up to be upgraded. I installed them... Most of it
appeared
>> to be Open Office upgrades. The upgrade blew up. I tracked the problem
down
>> to the fact that many files and directories on my system had a
modification
>> date of 12/12/2012! I fixed most of them with some "touch" scripts and
got
>> the upgrades to work.
>Where did those files come from? If they belong to some debian package,
>you might want to check the timestamps of the files in that package with:
I spent some time trying to figure this out. The question lead me to some
interesting facts. There are 125 .deb files in /var/cache/apt/archives that
had the 2012 date. I take that to mean that the clock was probably wrong
when these file were loaded. Many, many other files scattered around the
system were wrong.
The updates for the new packages came in a couple of waves - the first bunch
were just the ones that the Gnome applet (don't know what this is called)
prompted me to install. Once I did that I ran apt update and the second wave
came. I'm going to make the hypothesis that something during the first wave
changed my system clock to 2012. I extracted these lines from "ls -tl /etc":
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-12-11 16:17 vim
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-12-11 16:17 w3m
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-12-11 16:17 wpa_supplicant
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2007-12-11 16:17 xdg
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-12-11 16:17 xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 349 2007-12-11 15:45 mtab
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 46 2007-12-11 15:44 adjtime
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-12-11 15:41 gre.d
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 49345 2007-12-11 15:41 ld.so.cache
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-12-11 15:40 alternatives
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-12-11 15:40 bash_completion.d
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-12-11 15:40 openoffice
Everything with a date of "2007-12-11 16:17" was fixed when I ran my "touch"
script so these items had the date 2012. Indeed,
/var/cache/apt/archives/vim-common_1%3a7.0-122+1etch2_i386.deb had the 2012
date. So /etc/vim was probably hosed when it was installed.
It is interesting that /etc/adjtime is one of the last things that changed
before things went south. Does anyone know what programs mess with
/etc/adjtime? Maybe I can track that down....
Bob
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