Date/Time on Amiga 4000 (OS 3.1.4) without battery-backed clock

[Thomas]

The date and time is then taken from the "last modified" date of the root directory of the boot volume, if the boot volume is an FFS volume. Or rather, the FFS sets the date and time to this date. What other file systems do is up to the file system.

There are multiple time stamps in the root block of the FFS volume. Unfortunately the system time is taken from the "disk altered" field rather than the "dir altered" field. This means that changing files in the root directory does not have any effect on the system time on next boot. The only way to update the system time is to relabel the volume.

[Thomas]

I have tried using NetShutDown in the WHDLStartup script, but it never returns after being called - to me it seems the process gets locked.

NetShutdown requires that there are no active network connections. The network stack will automatically send Ctrl-C to all processes doing TCP/IP, but some might not respond to this signal. For example SMBFS does not quit if there are some files open on a network share.