Hello all,

I really appreciate anyone looking at this, but I have a really odd problem. It is a SuSE Linux 8.0 system that the time is jumping around wildly everytime we restart the OS. The date will even jump to points of time in 2004 or 2002 and various months in there. The time zone will change and the time will jump wildly

It looks a lot like a bad cmos battery, but we have replaced the entire motherboard on a Pentium 4 3.6 Ghz system. The CMOS battery is built into the motherboard on this this system.

We will try setting the time using both KDE and from command line with the following statements.

hwclock --set --date “12/02/03 13:22:00” --utc
hwclock --hctosys

And when we monitor the hardware clock versus system clock there is very little drift.

We have set the /etc/localtime file as well. That is linked to the /usr/share/zoneinfo/SystemV/CST6 timezone data file. We removed the link and rebuilt it. We even have shell set up the /etc/rc.d/rc5.d directory to force the localtime file to link to the correct tz data file and everytime I'm in the system prior to the reboot it is linked to the correct file.

We reset the timezone in yast2 as well, but on reboot the time will change.

Again, any insight into this would be appreciated. We are kind of tearing our hair out on this. Everything screems CMOS battery at me.

Thanks.

Try a different technique.

First, set the system time with the 'date' command.

Then set the hardware clock as you did with the 'hwclock' command.

That should calm it down.

Thanks for the suggestion, it appeared to work on the server that was the problem. We are now having it on another server and I cannot get that to stabilize, but that is not a problem.

Thanks for the good suggestion!

Paul

If the servers are on a network, you could try setting up one server as the timekeeper, and the others as clients synching with the timekeeper.

For more info, read up on ntpd (or xntpd on SuSE).