Re: [tlug] Serious clock wrongness

["Arwyn Hainsworth" <arwynh@example.com>]

On 03/04/07, Michael(tm) Smith <smith@example.com> wrote:

Keith Bawden <keith@example.com>, 2007-04-03 14:09 +0900:

> >Any suggestions for how I can troubleshoot what exactly the
> >problem is and/or some (automated) workaround I can use to correct
> >the clock (other than manually running hwclock or whatever at
> >periodic intervals)?
>
> If you run ntpd it should detect (over time) how much and at what rate
> your clock is drifting - "natural drift". The daemon will then
> compensate for this and attempt to keep things synced.

Yeah, I had heard a rumber that it was supposed to do that. But
that rumor turns out to be well, a damn lie. Because I'm running
ntpd and it is not exercising the expected degree of discipline.
Meaning, my clock is still drifts off, like an aimless youth.
Perhaps the problem is just lack of ambition, or the classic "long
term loss of short term memory" syndrome that results from smoking
too much "Mary Jane".

Your ntpd is actually being very disciplined and doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Ntpd does adjust for 'natural drift', but natural drift is usually only a few ms per day or so. If it detects a large difference it will refuse to update the clock, assuming some kind of error has occurred. It would be right. A drift of a few seconds per minute is very large and means something somewhere is not working as it is supposed to. I suspect parallels is to blame, since it is the one providing the 'hardware' clock, but there are a number of other things it could be so I'm not certain. If you can't find out what is causing it, it might be possible to configure ntpd to adjust the time even if the drift is larger than expected. If your drift is constant, then that'll solve the problem.

Arwyn