Hi,
i've got a rh 7.3 build and there seems to be a problem with my system clock,
after shutting down the system properly and then returning the next day, i find that the clock is out of sync, and then this progresses if i don't change the system clock everyday, resulting in the the date/time being completely out of range,

i noticed that when i had sendmail configured on startup, the message "clock skew detected - ... build may be incomplete "
was shown,
so i threw sendmail out (i didn't need it)
but the clock problem still persists
i tried using the date and the hwclock commands but to no avail , each time i shut it down and boot, the clock seems to remain in a standstill


is there a way to rectify it? also does anybody know how to issue the above two commands(date and hwclock) at startup?

Sounds like your CMOS battery is going. It happens sometimes. You almost certainly want to replace it, but if for some reason you can't/won't you can tell the latest versions of red hat to sync to an NTP server. I have no idea if 7.3 has that feature or not.

ok i thought about that, but an anomaly is that when i had a dual-boot machine, the other os(winnt) doesn't seem to have any problem with the time at all, how come?
now there isn't nt so i cannot verify that for sure
but i'll try the ntp server,
how do u do it in rh 8.0 (where in the menu's or control panel)

I had similar problem until this morning when I could finally fix it.
my system = gentoo.

According to my understanding (correct me if i'm wrong) and particularly in case of my machine, the localtime always got modified when I booted my computer (because of different timezone than the default UTF or GMT). And in the config (/etc/conf.d/clock in my case), I wrote it to set hardware clock time = system clock @shutdown. So the time accrued over subsequent reboots.
The problem as I understood was this, and I rectified it. I mention it here because it took me great time and effort to figure it out.
Final configs were-

</etc/conf.d/clock>
------
CLOCK="local #system clock = local. Also suggested for dual-boot
TIMEZONE="Asia/Calcutta" #replace with ur timezone
CLOCK_SYSTOHC="no" #dont set hwclock = sysclock @boot-down
#rest default
------

Then I had to set date manually using "date -s" and make sure the correct values of hwclock and sysclock 1st time. (it wasn't easy for me though)

and done...

This might be a good time to point out that RH 7.3 and 8.0 are yrs out of date and have not been supported for a long time (inc no security updates).
If at all possible, replace with a current distro eg RH Enterprise Linux, Centos (free ver of RHEL) or RH Fedora; assuming you want to stick with RH based distros.