time and date changed

[Goran Kubelka]

I have Proliant ML 370 servers with SuSE Mail Server II (Enterprise Edition). The problem is that time and date unexpectedly are changing during normal operation. I correct problem with "date" command but it lasts only for 1-2 days. Also the time and date will be changed for sure if there is system reboot.
Any idea?

[Claudio Cilloni]

try searching for something in the system logs,
like /var/log/messages (for RH systems, i don't know if SuSE has the same filename);
maybe you can find some useful information.

[Steven E. Protter]

The system clocks in most computer systems are notoriously inaccurate.

The best way to deal with this is to configure ntp.

All you need to do under Linux is pick an external time server and configure it in a file called ntp.conf

Here is my configuration on a server that also serves as a firewall.

server 140.221.8.88

# I chose the University of Chicago as my time server becasue its close and accurate.

Most people choose the Naval Observatory.

To start the service

service nptd start

To configure it to run at start time, use the chkconfig command.

SEP

[Zeev Schultz]

The question is who is jumping here -
system clock or hardware clock.I check
this with hwclock --show as I have the annoying
system clock on my HP Kayak xa jumping
forward 3 hours.
Interesting that my system clock show the correct values,but on both RedHat 7.3 and 9 with default kernel version I "enjoyed" this
behavior.Looking forward to dive deeply into
linux internals :)

Zeev

[Caesar_3]

Hello!

You should check what's happend to your hw clock.
For the time you can use the ntp (configure)
or start to use rdate command that is part
of linux (if you didn't install so install from the installation CD)
Use: rdate -s

Caesar

[Balaji N]

hi

ha! ha!. some one having the same problem i had until sometime back on my RHL8.0 box.

my timezone was set to IST and my hardware clock was also set to IST and the system was a dual boot running Windows also.

suddenly the time (the system clock) on my linux box used to advance by a period of +5.30 hrs (which is the difference betweeen IST and GMT). couldn't figure out the reason. i double checked the clock and saw that the timezone was proper, the hardware clock set to UTC was unchecked and there wasnt any cron job doing this.

but i couldnt figure this out. finally when i upgraded to RHL9.0 this problem got solved. (atleast for the 10 odd days i was using this box, there wanst any problem.) Though i used to work very minimally on windows, this problem didnt occur there.

may be when you discover the reason you could let us know. also, the date change what you are talking is the differnece between your timezone and GMT?

Pls clarify.

-balaji (and unfortunately my friend google didnt have any solution for this problem!)

[Balaji N]

forgot to add that, all i used to do was to sync my system clock with the hardware clock.

hwclock --hctosys as root.

-balaji