Hi all,

The problem I have is beyond my abilities to fault find. I have two machines (the specs of which I don't think are that important at this stage) with a single NIC each. Both systems are running SuSE v10, fresh installations, no updates.

I am running, lets call it BACKUP without a monitor, keyboard and mouse as I do not have the room and just want it as a backup system and server. When I log into BACKUP commands seem to take a while to register. I have run 'top' and although it doesn't indicate any jobs using huge amounts of CPU or memory the 'uptime' readout is something like this:

I should point out that when 'top' is running locally or remotely it usually updates every 3 seconds. Via ssh to BACKUP, it updates every 5 seconds but takes much longer than that to display the update. That is, only see information every 30 seconds or so but its the information I should have seen 26 seconds ago. Its almost as if I am in the event horizon of a blackhole and the BACKUP machine is just outside.

Ok another strange thing I just noticed is when I run the date command repeatedly. See below and look careful at the seconds readout of the time. It is going up and down. Ignore the fact that the date and time is set wrong (it should still keep accurate time, shouldn't it?).

Anyone have any suggestions about what is wrong? Thanks for your help.

A wrong date/time will screw up responsiveness of SSH sessions.

A clock that keeps bad time... That's a bit scarier. I suggest you run ntpd on this machine if possible.