I know that talking about add-ons has its own forum, but I feel this is too important to not share with everyone.
If you are a Xojo user - GET ARBED from @Thomas Tempelmann ! Trust me on this. Even if you just buy the low cost option, this tool can (and did) save 100’s of manhours of code work in the event of a project becoming corrupt.
Our SVN server crashed and on reboot no one noticed that the system clock had reset to 3 years ago. For more than 2 months, we’ve been checking in code changes from 3 systems and only today had the need to check something out. Boy were we cross when we did not get back what we asked for … via some SVU-Fu and BRU restores, we were able to get the repository back to normal, but 8 of our working projects were a complete mess. By utilizing the compare and merge features in Arbed, I was about to get 7 if the 8 projects back to where they should be and determine that we were complete design idiots on the 8th, shelving that code for a fresh start.
A HUGE thank you to Thomas for such an important tool!
Not a help, Kevin. This wasn’t about why the time on the system was off (and it goes far deeper than an NTP server connection) - and we even run our own time servers slaved to the national servers - it was about the fact that Arbed saved our bacon.
It was a question. Presumably you were using ntp, which you confirmed, but your system still managed to end up 3 years in the past. You didn’t mention how that was possible or if it was something that could or should be of concern to anyone else. I was just wondering what was up with that? If it’s not relevant and you don’t want to discuss it on the forum that’s fine, but if it is a potential problem that could harm other systems knowing what it is and how to prevent it would be very helpful I think.
I didn’t intend to upset or offend, and I’m glad your situation was recoverable, and Thomas does make some nice tools, so agree with your well directed praise.
The issue was a problem in communicating with the DHCP server, actually. The crash went so far as to corrupt the MAC address in the system’s BIOS environment (this machine is an old Pentium III 733MHz running an even older 2.6-based Linux distro). That led to a further cascade of events - including the inability to communicate with the internal ntp server resulting in the system using the last stored hardware date/time - which was 3 years old. That’s how long that system had been running without interruption.
EDIT - it’s now been replaced by a late model Mac Mini running OS X 10.8.5.
