Slashdot Mirror
Weird PC Clock Behavior?
cybercyst asks: "I've been having a problem with this for quite some time, and thought it was just me -- until two good friends of mine experienced the same problem. What we are experiencing is best described as a time-skew: our system time is apparently jumping forward an hour, and then returning to normal. It repeats this multiple times, and as far as I can tell only a reboot is any sort of remedy for this, albeit a temporary one. As you can imagine this causes all sorts of problems (under windows managers xscreensaver is always popping up -- in fact as I wrote this, the screensaver has come on over 10 times, negative fps in OpenGL programs, extremely large ping times, and so forth)."
"Friend A runs an Athlon system on a Soyo Dragon motherboard, I'm running a K6-2 450Mhz CPU on an older Epox motherboard. We are both running Slackware 8.0 with kernel 2.4.17, but Friend B runs nothing but Red Hat, and kernel 2.4.2-2.
I have personally tried many things to get this fixed permanently, including setting the time with 'date -s; hwclock --hctosys; hwclock --systohc' the BIOS is set to the right time that doesn't seems to help! So, I'm asking Slashdot, Has anyone out there encountered a similar problem, and if they have, have you been able to fix it?"
Have you checked for nearby chronoton emisions?
Try a tatacion burst, that normaly helps...
"Oh no, not again"
If you're going to spend $1250 to fix a linux bug, why not spend significantly less and fix them all at the same time
Windows comment may be flamebait, but the boards do really cost $1250!
It's not a virus? I received an e-mail that advised about a terrible virus that no antivirus company could defeat, and both IBM and Microsoft were very concerned with it, althought, of course, they also could nothing to stop this beast.
Have you by chance opened an e-mail with subject "Good Times"? You should have deleted it upon receipt. Now you're infected. And, because of the name "Good Times", it sure can change your computer time.
That was an easy one. Next !
As many have already pointed out, once the OS successfully boots the responsibility of maintaining the current time transfers to the operating system. As a result of this transition, 'time drift' is completely possible - even common - on systems that maintain long up-times (e.g. *nix).
As the original question states, this offset in time is automatically corrected upon reboot. This is due to the OS once again keying off from the far more reliable internal hardware clock.
To me, the cause/solution to this individual's issue is quite apparent. The issue is caused by running far too stable of an operating system - LINUX. As such, the somewhat obvious solution to change the installed OS to something a bit, shall we say, less reliable.
Like many, when I think of unreliability I immediately think of Windows!!! May I suggest the ME version - in my very limited experience with this product, I have found it to be most unstable...your consequently, workstation will never go without a reboot for a long enough period to ever experience time drift again!!!
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