Time change by itself

xgreen · 07-10-2006, 10:48 AM

mates,

I've one server that the time is always changing although I've stopped the ntp service. I've check 'crontab -e' for all user just in case somebody running ntpdate using crontab but no avail.

I've done some test using ntpdate to sync with other server & the time will change back after 2 or 3 sec to the 'original time'.

Code:

server1:~ # ntpdate xxx.xxx.x.xxx
      10 Jul 16:27:37 ntpdate[14042]: step time server xxx.xxx.x.xxx offset 592.769672 sec
      server1:#
      Message from syslogd@server1 at Mon Jul 10: 16:17:51 2006 ...
      server1 time_change: - 592 secs 770000 usecs
~

is there anyway to detect what kind of program/script that change the time. I've tried to look ps -ef & top but found nothing wierd.

The server is Suse Linux 8.1

MensaWater · 07-10-2006, 01:22 PM

crontab -l only shows what is in the crontab in /var/spool/cron for the user that executed the crontab command.

If the time were being set by root and you ran the command as another user it wouldn't show you root's file. You need to check for all users.

In addition to that crontab there are other cron related files in /etc such as /etc/cron.d, /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.weekly etc...
It is possible that the time change you're seeing is in one of these.