[lug] Time Warp

[Paul E Condon]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 04:19:58PM -0500, Gordon Golding wrote:
> I have a server that every once in a while, changes it's time - maybe once a week?  I look at it and it's fine for a few days and then at 13:31 the date says it's 7:31.  (6 hours...?)  I thought there might be some script doing it, but I checked crontab for all the added users and root and there is nothing there.
> 
> I have a little script running now to grab 'date' regularly, so I can see when it happens.
> 
> I'm in the correct timezone; Denver, not using NTP.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> I thought about just activating NTP and pointing at the default clock.redhat.com.  If something actively resets the time,  will this re-synch it?  How long does that take?
> 

Is this really a server that is up most of the time? Does it dual boot into Windows?
Symptoms like this can be caused by hardware clock being set to local time and some, but
not all, software components believing clock is 'zulu'.

I recommend against just turning on NTP. That would result in unobserved jumps of six 
hours both formard and backward. At least now half the jumps happen when you are watching.

Your script to gather data is a good idea.

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon at mesanetworks.net