system time mysteriously changes

John john at starfire.mn.org
Mon Jan 17 08:49:40 PST 2005


On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 09:28:04AM -0700, Danny MacMillan wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 09:05:53PM -0800, Kevin Smith wrote:
> > I'm having a problem with my system clock.  The time will be fine for
> > a few days, then all of a sudden, I will notice that it has jumped
> > ahead by a number of hours (usually enough to change the day to the
> > next day). I can confirm that the time has changed on the system
> > cloth in the BIOs setup as well.  This has happened once every few
> > days.
> > 
> > I thought it may be a clock battery problem on the the motherboard, but 
> > I am thinking that this is not the case as the minutes are usually OK - 
> > it is just the hours/day that changes.
> > 
> > Another idea that I had was that because I am dual booting windows (on 
> > occasion) and freeBSD, windows may be the culprit, but  I verified that 
> > by rebooting windows, it is not resetting the system clock.
> 
> If you told FreeBSD when installing that your system clock was set to
> UTC that is likely the problem.  Windows assumes the system clock is
> set to local time.  It's moving exactly 8 hours, which appears to be
> your time zone offset from UTC.  Go into /stand/sysinstall and tell it
> your system clock is set to local time.  I'm not sure where that is;
> there might even be command line utilities that will do it more easily
> but it should be easy to find.  You'll probably have to reset the clock
> afterwards but I suspect that will be the end of your problems.
> 
> > Any ideas on what could be wrong ?  I also have ntpd running, which I 
> > used as an attempt to keep the clock set correctly (in effort to find a 
> > solution to the problem), but it does not appear to be able to handle 
> > correcting the time.
> 
> If the offset is too large ntpd won't by default be able to correct it.
> A good idea is to enable ntpdate at boot as well.  ntpdate will sync
> the clock at boot, and ntpd will keep it synced thereafter.  I have
> this in my rc.conf, in addition to my ntpd setup:
> 
> ntpdate_enable="YES"
> ntpdate_flags="-b -v"
> 
> You shouldn't have to specify a server in your case; ntpdate will read
> your existing ntp.conf for that.

I think that adjkerntz is not working correctly.  I am having the
same problem.

As adjkerntz doesn't appear to have been fiddled with in a long,
long time, it must be something else about the current environment.

Anyway - when I use adjkerntz - my time gets set ahead 5 hours.  This
odd, since I am 6 hours from GMT.    I think that Kevin is having
the same problem, where his clock is getting bumped by 1 hour
less than his GMT offset.  I have temporarily commented out the
adjkerntz entry in my /etc/crontab, and advised him to do the same.
When I have some time tonight, when I'm not doing my "real job,"
I'll look into this and see if I can figure out what's going on.
It's something strange!
-- 

John Lind
john at starfire.MN.ORG


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