hay folks

i've made a cronjob to sync my date and time with a timeserver using ntpdate...

when i run the script everything works fine, but when i add this one to my cronjob, i get errors...

59 * * * * /bin/timesync.sh

gives me (dmesg): set_rtc_mmss: can't update from 0 to 59

the script is very simple:
ntpdate ntp.blabla.com

there are a lot of topics about this issue, but very technical, and i don't understand the shizzle... it's important for me to correct the systemtime very often because the systems clock is going very wrong..

You're attempting to change it just before the hour changes (59 after the hour) and it appears it is already AT the hour (0) so it is trying to set 59 back to 0 which is quite a leap. You might want to run it in the middle of an hour (30) and see if that helps.

Also you don't need to script it. On my Debian I have:

22 * * * * /usr/sbin/ntpdate ntp.blabla.com >>/var/log/ntpdate.log 2>&1

This tells it to run ntpdate 22 minutes after the hour and is working fine for me.

Also you don't have logging in cron. You should do as I've done above if you want logging OR redirect to /dev/null if you don't want logging. Since cron runs in the background it has nowhere to send its output.

Also if you're time keeps going off it may be your hardware clock is wrong.

Type "hwclock;date". The hwclock will show you what time the hardward clock thinks it is and the date will show you what time the system thinks it is. ntpdate is setting system time only.

Once your system time is correct you can run "hwclock --systohc" which will set your hardware clock to the same time as system. This may keep your system time from going off frequently as you've mentioned it does.

jlightner, thx for the response! everything works fine!

what i've done:
change my crontab to:
5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /bin/timesync.sh

so it runs the script every 5 minutes...
in the script i add the full path to ntpdate, otherwise i get an error "command not found"

thx!