ntpd going haywire? (from Aug 25 2003 to Jan 9 1984)

[Edwin Woudt]

Yesterday I noticed that one of my machines thought it was living in 1984 
for a while. An excerpt from /var/log/messages:

Aug 25 08:55:18 edwin ntpd[99]: time reset -0.226462 s
Jan  9 09:04:04 edwin ntpd[99]: time reset -619315200.105133 s
Jan  9 09:30:59 edwin ntpd[99]: time reset 0.858392 s
Aug 25 11:13:05 edwin ntpd[99]: time reset 619315200.044631 s

If I read the manpage for ntpd correctly, whenever an offset exceeds the 
sanity limit of 1000 seconds, it should quit and not change the time. So 
what went wrong here?

I did note that 619315200 seconds is exactly 7168 days (=7*1024), so it 
looks like a few bits got flipped around. (Though a random memory problem 
does not sound plausible, because two hours later the exact reverse 
happened)


[07:13:42 root at edwin ~] uname -a
FreeBSD edwin.kabel.utwente.nl 4.8-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE #7: Thu May 
1 16:43:45 CEST 2003     edwin at hermes.edwin:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/HERMES 
i386
[07:13:45 root at edwin ~] cat /etc/rc.conf | grep ntpd
xntpd_enable="YES"
[07:13:53 root at edwin ~] cat /etc/ntp.conf
server chime1.surfnet.nl
server chime2.surfnet.nl

driftfile /etc/ntp.drift


Edwin