I've got a 64-bit Intel PC running Debian 8 with a capacitor-based clock, which means after 3 days without power the time is lost from the hardware clock. To help work-around this, I was thinking we could use a nearby computer on the LAN (with a better battery-backed RTC) to act as a local NTP server.
On boot, will the PC be able to perform an NTP sync fast enough that by the time the "normal" applications start up (esp. our user applications) they are using the correct time, and we aren't dealing with time discontinuities? Our primary function is data logging, so if we started a log file as 1970 and then had it leap to 2016 that would be catastrophic.
fake-hwclock
package to save/restore a reasonable time in a file, until ntp syncs up. – meuh Jun 3 '16 at 15:18