time keeps on slipping... slipping...

[Chris Nehren]

On Sun, Oct 07, 2012 at 21:02:39 -0700 , John-Mark Gurney wrote:
> I recently put together a new machine w/ a SuperMicro H8SCM and an
> AMD Opteron 4228 HE...  I've having an issue where the clock on the
> machine skips around...  The wierd part is that it's very sudden when
> it happens...  ntp sometimes brings it back, but it can't when the clock
> gets too far ahread (1000 seconds), ntp dies...
> 
> In order to catch it happening, I ran a sleep 60 loop fetching time
> from another server that keeps time correctly via:
> while sleep 60; do echo -n h2:; nc h2 13; date; ntpdate h2.funkthat.com; done
> 
> here are some snippits:
> h2:Sun Oct  7 17:12:54 2012^M
> Sun Oct  7 17:12:54 PDT 2012
>  7 Oct 17:12:54 ntpdate[31036]: the NTP socket is in use, exiting
> h2:Sun Oct  7 17:13:48 2012^M
> Sun Oct  7 17:20:21 PDT 2012
>  7 Oct 17:20:21 ntpdate[31045]: the NTP socket is in use, exiting
> 
> but then ntp brings it back in sync:
> h2:Sun Oct  7 17:28:49 2012^M
> Sun Oct  7 17:35:21 PDT 2012
>  7 Oct 17:35:21 ntpdate[31164]: the NTP socket is in use, exiting
> h2:Sun Oct  7 17:29:49 2012^M
> Sun Oct  7 17:29:49 PDT 2012
>  7 Oct 17:29:49 ntpdate[31170]: the NTP socket is in use, exiting
> 
> I have switched my timecounter to HPET to see if things are different...
> 
> Any clues?

Looks like faulty hardware to me. You shouldn't need to work that hard
to keep the clock in sync. Can you boot a livecd of e.g. Linux or
OpenIndiana and reproduce the issue?

-- 
Thanks and best regards,
Chris Nehren
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