Hey all. I have a strange and very annoying problem. I'm running gentoo and I have my /etc/conf.d/clock settings set CLOCK="local" and TIMEZONE="EST". I date the date/time using date and everything was fine....

about an hour later the clock was 45 minutes behind. A day later it was far far worse.

Does anyone have any idea why this would happen? I need my system to be 100% reliable and if it cannot even tell what TIME or DAY it is then its pretty useless.

Thanks.

I assume you are using an online time server? I would start by replacing the 'cmos' battery.

I'm not using any kind of internet time server actually. Never have. Should I be?

Also...I suppose I could buy a new CMOS battery. I did have a power issue earlier last month that knocked out power to 4 systems.

How would I go about using an internet time server?

Take a look in your administration centre for the option to connect to an internet time server.

Something is seriously wrong with your clock.

Does time drift so fast if you are running a "live CD" distro (in which case there's something wrong with your slack install)?

As a temporary fix, you could look into something like an ntp daemon to keep your time synchronised. This can be set up to check the time against a local ntp server and also keep a watch on how fast your local clock "drifts" and gradually apply a correction factor to it.

More information here: http://tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/basic-ntp-config.html

There are loads of public ntp servers scattered about. If lost you can always use
ntpdate pool.ntp.org
But I don't think they'll like it if you poll them every minute (so setup the "drift" file, and check once a day once the drift has been computed).

I just installed a new CMOS battery and my time issues seem to have vanished. I guess that power knockout from before really did a number!

Thanks for all your input!

You're welcome

I was hoping my time issues were a thing of the past (no pun intended) but it seems my clock has drifted by 15 minutes as of this writing. It was fine last night...I'm not sure what the problem here is. Could there be something with my linux config that is overwriting the time or is my mobo really just borked?

Any suggestions are very appreciated.

Thanks.

Ok guys. I purchased a new power strip hoping this might be a case of an old power strip gone bad. Everything booted correctly and the BIOS reported correct time.

However now my clock is speeding WAY too fast!!! Every 45 or 30 seconds my clock goes past a minute. I can't believe this.

Its interesting to note that date returns the super speed clock but hwclock --show returns a much closer results! It seems accurate.

Any idea why hwclock is ok but date is not?

I've deleted /etc/localtime and copied /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST to /etc/localtime just in case and I've changed TIMEZONE="EST" in /etc/conf.d/clock

This doesn't seem to have fixed anything as my clock is still speeding ahead.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Currently I read somewhere that someone fixed this problem by disabling ACPI in boot as a kernel boot param. I will try this when I return home. I'm still open for ideas.

Thanks.

P.S. I'm running Gentoo and not Slack nowadays. I'll update status soon.

ANY suggestions at all would be cool. Even taking my mobo out and throwing it out of a window...

I made a suggestion in post #5:
If you had done this and told us what the result was, we'd maybe know by now if you have a hardware or software problem.

You might also like to read these two pages: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Clock-1.html and
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Clock-2.html

Hey. Sorry I ignored your suggestion for running a LIVECD to check if time drifts there too. I'm a bit hesitant to do that because this server is also my NAS server/Web server/NFS/etc. I have a LOT of things going on on this machine (which is why this time problem is so annoying) and having a livecd running means I cannot have these services up.

I will try this anyway when I know noone needs access to NAS (maybe during the night on saturday or something) and see what results.

Thanks

If it is an always on machine, why not install ntp so all your other machines can sync off it.

Even if it just to learn something new. Ntp is pretty easy and uses bugger all download.