I don't have mine yet (Fedex arrived with it today, but I wasn't in, so almost there).  But for a similar situation (an Asus wl500gx) I use rsync over a network to a USB drive on a PC (which is then backed up there, as well).

There's one here, which is what I got from my download:
http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=434.0#msg2974

Somewhere around there's a driver for the LED(s).  If you set this to "on" or "heartbeat" presumably it would go off on shutdown?

Don't you already know the services running on your network?

If hardware clocks were accurate no-one would have written ntp.
30ppm isn't much.  Far better than my typing skills.

The other way to do it, which occurred to me later and is what I do for the CompactFlash card on my Asus wl500g, is to shut the system down, take out the card and fsck it on another Linux system.

Whoopee do!  My shipping status has changed to "Shipped via FedEx International" this evening!  Ordered 27 June (well - it was for me, but GT's date has the 26th, and they shipped it in the morning).

You're both missing the point.  Use emacs  .

But, if you are setting the hardware clock it presumably has one.  Why would you want to set it everytime?  Why not read from it to get the time first, rather than hardwire January 2009?
The time to set it is on shutdown. And every hour with a cron job (to cover crashes, which don't have a shutdown).

The "usual" thing to do is to give forcefsck as an additonal boot parameter (or create a /forcefsck file before rebooting). At least it s for RedHat and Mandriva. Have a look in yor /etc/.rc.sysinit file.  It will then fsck all disk mounted at boot time, including the root partition (but if it changes anything there it will reboot immediately afterwards).

You may not want to run that as is anyway.  It's going to set the system time to a fixed time (18:00, Jan 26, 2009), and then set the hardware clock based on that.  Seems a very strange thing for a boot script to be doing.

Your problem is not unique.
This just showed up on slashdot (haven't read any of it beyond the intro, yet...)

http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/08/03/2151225/Entropy-Problems-For-Linux-In-the-Cloud

There is this Entropy Gathering Daemon, which might enable you to gather sufficient randomness?

Perhaps there's hope for my June 26 order seeing progress shortly, then.

On the subject of response to mails I reported yesterday that their website had no horizontal scroll bar in Firefox, but did in IE.  A bit annoying when the LOGIN button is on the R/h side (or, in my case, underneath the bezel  ).  Pointed out that it was caused by "overflow: -moz-scrollbars-vertical; " in the style sheet.  I had a reply back today - and it's fixed!

You could try using /dev/urandom, which won't block (but won't be "as random" if not being fed enough randomness.