topic Re: date is changing !!!! in Operating System - HP-UX

date is changing !!!!

Elias Abboud — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 09:48:23 GMT

hi everyone,

I am having a weird problem. my system is an a400 server/hpux 11.00 . the date started changing on its own. this happened after I have changed the systemboard. To try to resolve this issue i replaced the system board battery with a new one thinking this might be the problem. The system does not shutdown since it is an online system so the battery should not have any effect on the system date.

can anyone help????

any help or hint will be greatly appreciated.
thanks in advance.

Re: date is changing !!!!

Patrick Wallek — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 09:52:01 GMT

How much is the date changing? Is it the actual day of the month? Or just the time? How often does this happen?

Re: date is changing !!!!

Chris Wilshaw — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 09:53:08 GMT

When you say the date is changing on its own, do you mean that the server is repeatedly resetting itself to the same date, or that the internal clock seems to be running too quickly, and is advancing the date?

Re: date is changing !!!!

RAC_1 — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 09:54:11 GMT

/etc/set_params date

It should not chnage afterwards. What makes you think that the date is changing?? Ot is it just the TZ settings??

Anil

Re: date is changing !!!!

Michael_356 — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 09:56:23 GMT

Hi there,

what do you mean with:
"date is changing"?
normally date is changed once a day.

If you mean your appearance of the date and time string, check your local settings with locale.

regards

Michael

Re: date is changing !!!!

V. Nyga — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 09:59:08 GMT

Hi,

have you checked if a cron job is defined?
Or is time zone changing?

Volkmar

Re: date is changing !!!!

Chris Vail — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 09:59:13 GMT

As a rule, a $5 watch keeps better time than a $50,000 computer. The on-board clocks are notoriously unreliable. The Network Time Protocol was developed specifically to deal with this issue. You can setup NTP through SAM, but you need an external source of time information (an internet connection will do fine).

This is covered in chapter 35 of Rafeeq Ur Rehman's book _HP Certified_. I highly recommend it.

Re: date is changing !!!!

Mark Greene_1 — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 10:00:43 GMT

Given that you have changed the system board, it is possible that the new board has a bad clock. Are you running ntp on the system? If so, what sort of errors are you seeing in the syslog about it?

mark

Re: date is changing !!!!

John Waller — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 10:07:01 GMT

If when you talk about date you are meaning the time, we had a similar problem on an A400 after a system board change and it turned out to be a dip switch set to the wrong position. I think we were taling about 5 minutes per hour drift.

Re: date is changing !!!!

Elias Abboud — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 10:09:17 GMT

hi everyone,

what i mean is that every couple of hours i take a look at the time of the server i find it late by about 4 hours.

any help?

Re: date is changing !!!!

Elias Abboud — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 10:13:47 GMT

thanks for ur reply,

where can i find the meaning of the dip switch on the system board? and to what should i set them. Can you send me a document explaining the meaning of each setting for the dip switch? maybe this really is the problem....

thanks in advance

Re: date is changing !!!!

Peter Godron — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 10:14:48 GMT

Elias,
if the system clock is so badly out, I would suspect either a faulty clock or a cron job.
Best thing to do would be to print a message every 10 minutes and time the delay. That way you know whether it is a slow growth (clock) or a one-off hit (cron)
Regards

Re: date is changing !!!!

Peter Godron — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 10:32:51 GMT

Elias,
after you reset the time does the difference stay the same i.e. Is the system time slowing or is the difference static.
Please see threads:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=136748
and
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=114243
Regards

Re: date is changing !!!!

Bill Hassell — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 10:36:14 GMT

If it is exactly 4hours, the date is probably not changing at all. Your $TZ variable controls the display of GMT (which is what HP-UX runs). To see GMT time/date:

TZ=GMT0 date

To see the date in US Pacific timezone:

TZ=PST8PDT date

which is 8 hours less than GMT. If the date slowly changes (a few minutes at a time) then you likely have a hardware problem. But if it jumps by hours, it is very likely the TZ variable which is automatically set with 'normal' logins in /etc/profile and configured by the file: /etc/TIMEZONE.

Re: date is changing !!!!

HGN — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 10:39:29 GMT

Hi Elias

If the system clock is getting out of sync and if there is no cron job then it should be with the system board. Make sure there is nothing on the cron table to eliminate the suspicion. Also make sure that the ntp is running and getting to sync with a server.

Rgds

HGN

Re: date is changing !!!!

A. Clay Stephenson — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 10:40:33 GMT

There was also a firmware patch for the A boxes that corrected drifting clocks. You should update to the latest firmware as a matter of course.

Re: date is changing !!!!

John Waller — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 12:33:32 GMT

Elias,
Sorry can't help you with the dip switches. The server was on an HP support contract and an engineer came out and changed it. I believe it was related to the clock speed and I think it was set to 60Mhz and no 50Mhz but this was March 2004 and I've had plently of late nights since then.