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?"

Comments

use ntpd

[Andrew Lockhart]

once a linux system (i'm presuming you're using linux because you mentioned hwclock) has booted it doesn't use the hardware clock to keep time any longer and instead relies on the kernels own internal timing structures. in short use ntpd, it will query a time server periodically and correct your clock drift.

for more info on how linux keeps time checkout the hwclock and adjtimex man pages.

Re:Try Truetime

[Kingfox]

True. At least it keeps all of the lab computers (many logins during a day) on time, and people who login daily can't drift THAT much.