Stupid Questions I have always wanted to ask...

OK first stupid question.

I am compiling a new kernel and I noticed the system clock is off on that box.

Changing system time while compiling // installing kernel. Does it have any negative effect?
 
OK first stupid question.

I am compiling a new kernel and I noticed the system clock is off on that box.

Changing system time while compiling // installing kernel. Does it have any negative effect?

When compiling it might not include compilation of some files that have changed and hence should be recompiled.
 
OK first stupid question.

I am compiling a new kernel and I noticed the system clock is off on that box.

Changing system time while compiling // installing kernel. Does it have any negative effect?
It does. When timestamps are inconsistent, some compilation stacks do complain and fail.

If you have to change the system time, wait until the compilation is over.
 
Exactly. Moving time forward is safe: Of you for example jump from 2 in the afternoon to 3 in the afternoon, then absolutely nothing happened between 2 and 3, but computers know how to handle delays.

Moving time backwards is unsafe. If at 3pm you go back to 2pm, and there are two events, one at 2:15 and one at 2:45, nobody can tell which happened first. A program like Make might get confused by that, and for example think a source code that was last changed at 2:15 must have been compiled already, because the object file was created at 2:45. But since the 2:15 might be from the second time around and the 2:45 from the first time, that could be wrong.

If you have to move time backwards, make sure that nothing time sensitive is running at the time. For example do it in single-user mode during a reboot. Or run NTP all the time, then the whole problem won't even arise.
 
"Stupid Questions you always wanted to ask but never dared" could be a very interesting thread, even very educational if I'm just looking at this first not really stupid question, and the answers.
 
"Stupid Questions you always wanted to ask but never dared" could be a very interesting thread, even very educational if I'm just looking at this first not really stupid question, and the answers.
What are you waiting for? If Reddit has "NoStupidQuestions", what's FreeBSD to stop?
 
Oh I got one. What's the "staff" group for? Seems it's been present on every system I ever installed since the beginning of time, but I never understood its purpose so I've been stubbornly ignoring it for over a quarter of a century now.
 
Oh I got one. What's the "staff" group for? Seems it's been present on every system I ever installed since the beginning of time, but I never understood its purpose so I've been stubbornly ignoring it for over a quarter of a century now.
Maybe
wheel = system administrators
staff = privileged users with limited rights.
 
OK first stupid question.

I am compiling a new kernel and I noticed the system clock is off on that box.

Changing system time while compiling // installing kernel. Does it have any negative effect?
Might mess up file time based dependency checking. Personally I would abort the build and start again from scratch to be sure. "If in doubt, use brute force."

But set up ntpd on the box before running the build again. You need these two values in rc.conf
"ntpd_enable="YES"'
"ntpd_sync_on_start="YES"
- and edit your ntp.conf...
and 'service ntpd start', or just reboot the box.
 
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