booting 6085 XDE 5.0 settime.boot

[Al Kossow]

what I just posted on comp.sys.xerox

I probably should just email Don Woodward or Dave Curbow.

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On 10/13/16 11:03 AM, Huge wrote:

> Has *no-one* implemented an XNS time-server on, say, Linux?
>

There are Unix implementations of XNS from way back, but as far as I know
no one has moved these forward to modern systems.

My first message was a bit cryptic, mainly to target folks who would be
familiar with the problem to reply. The problem is the designers of the
OS wisely knew that running with the clock not set was a bad idea, so
unless the software boot switch "\200" is set, the system will hang at
MP code 937 waiting for the network time server to reply. There are a
couple of ways around the problem. Provide a modern clock service on the
net, install a boot program that forces the user to enter the time and
date, then jump to the OS boot, or boot without setting the date and either
have a program run at startup manually or in the startup script to do it.
There isn't a general solution to installing the time setting boot program,
since it requires a partition separate from the OS to install the boot file
into, and I'm not sure how it knows which partition to reboot into. The only
example I've seen of that was reusing the Scavenger partition in ViewPoint
when installing a Standalone system. I'm not sure yet how Interlisp-D sets
the time (have to pull my installation disks out of storage).
So what I was looking for was if this was solved back in the day in a general
fashion