Set Time When Offline (Pogoplug)

[giftedhamster]

Hey all,

I've gotten Plex Media Server up and running on a Pogoplug V02 and things are going great! I'm only running into one hitch in regards to setting the time.

My girlfriend is currently without internet and we've been running into problems because we always want to watch stuff at her place but don't have an easy/portable way to do so. My primary idea behind my PogoPlex server was to use a wireless stick in AP mode to create a private net and Plex server that would stream to a Chromecast. I could load up the media onto a thumbdrive at my place, plug the server in at hers, and voila, Offline Plex. I'm still waiting on the wireless stick to test the AP part of the problem, but the offline mode has gotten me curious about the need to set system time for the Plex Server to work correctly.

First, is this still the case? I saw a post on the Plex forums that mentioned the UDP blast the server does was a bug in the server timer. Do I still need to account for this by setting the system time?

Second, do I run any risk by manually setting the time to any arbitrary time using "timedatectl"? Does anyone have a solution by which I can set the time from ntp when I'm on the net, but maybe manually set it to something that works when I'm not?

Any other advice is greatly appreciated.

[moonman]

Don't know if the problem with plexmediaserver still persists...

To set the time, you can make one of the computers on the network an ntp server, or if you don't even have a network, then you will need to restore a reasonable time from a file.

The simplest would be writing a script that sets a fixed time at boot
The more complicated would be to save time at shutdown to a file then setting that time at bootup.

For the second method this is a good reference: http://archplusplus.co.uk/post/31401843 ... spberry-pi , however there's no rc scripts anymore so you will have to rewrite that for systemd.

[moonman]

I put this in our repo:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'pacman -Sy fake-hwclock')

Then enable the service:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'systemctl enable fake-hwclock')

Make sure you have good time set before you restart/shutdown for the first time after the service was installed. Otherwise the time will be set to the time when I created the package (which I guess is better than 1969).

[giftedhamster]

fake-hwclock is exactly what I'm looking for. I was afraid I was going to have to hack something together. Thanks so much!

[WarheadsSE]

And remember that the Pogoplug is not going to have the horses to transcode, so make sure it is in a format it does not have to transcode for the Chromecast!

[giftedhamster]

I've actually been working on a droplet for OSX for some months now that's helped me out a great deal when transcoding simple batches, and I made a Chromecast preset for just this occasion. Hope it's useful to someone besides me: https://github.com/csparker247/ffdropenc

NOTE: It's just a gui wrapper for some crazy shell scripting, so it makes it easy to download the .app and change presets as you see fit.