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Description of problem:

If the current time in the BIOS is moved to the future, at the time of boot system drops emergency prompt and asks to fsck the disk. Filesystem is ext3.

How reproducible:
can't reproduce the issue consistently. On some occasions, it boots fine without issues and sometime running e2fsck doesn't seem to fix it.

Steps to Reproduce:
1) Change system time to a future value in BIOS. Reboote system and log in (System will mount the root filesystem with future timestamp)
2) Change system time to a past value in BIOS. Reboot system, System will fail  
   when it will try to mount the root filesystem.
3) Do a e2fsck<root device>  and reboot the system.

Actual results:
This fixed issue and logged in, system chosen the old date.  On some occasions, it boots fine without issues and sometime running e2fsck doesn't seem to fix it.

Expected results:
e2fsck should fix this. 

Additional info:
e2fsprogs-1.41.12-3.el6

Since RHEL 6.1 External Beta has begun, and this bug remains
unresolved, it has been rejected as it is not proposed as
exception or blocker.

Red Hat invites you to ask your support representative to
propose this request, if appropriate and relevant, in the
next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Some of this is expected, but there are patches upstream to relax the clock vs. timestamp requirements.  These could be added so that less severe clock differences don't cause a forced fsck.

Actually, all of these upstream commits are in place in the RHEL6 e2fsprogs package.

It is by design that e2fsck -p won't work when the time looks "insane," and a manual fsck is requested.

If this is what you see, it is actually working as intended.

There is also an option, "broken_system_clock" :

from RELEASE-NOTES:

> E2fsck now will completely skip time-based checks if the system clock
> looks insane or the option broken_system_clock is set in
> /etc/e2fsck.conf.

so this behavior can be changed.

I'm going to close this NOTABUG, but feel free to re-open if you feel that this is incorrect, with more detail or rationale...

Thanks,
-Eric