[ntp:questions] Clock suddenly running ahead overnight, sometimes.

geep geepat at waheh.co.uk
Mon Aug 20 11:11:34 UTC 2012


Hope this post isn't too off-topic for ntp forum...
Haven't used my Slackware Linux PC for a couple of days. When started 
this morning was surprised to see:
 20 Aug 09:10:49 ntpdate[3116]: step time server 139.143.5.30
  offset -684197.258181 sec                    
whilst running:
  timeserver1="ntp1.npl.co.uk"
  timeserver2="ntp2.npl.co.uk"
  /usr/sbin/ntpdate -b  $timeserver1 $timeserver2
from /etc/rc.d/rc.local

Looking in /var/syslog (see below) I can see three occasions recently 
when the clock has raced ahead whilst the PC is switched off.

I'm about to go and buy a new CMOS battery. Battery is 5 years old, same 
as the PC. But intuitively I'd have thought that an old battery would make
the clock run slow.

Curious to know if others have seen fast clocks with old batteries?
Or any other observations...

Keeping my fingers crossed that a new battery will fix the fast clock.
And maybe a recent rebooot problem, which only affects the OS on one of my
disk drives. The PC will only reboot properly when 'cold' e.g. overnight 
switch-off, but this only affects the OS (Linux & Win7) on 1 particular
disk. Rebooting during the first 5 minutes is fine, but after that it 
just reboots to the legacy grub menu. All other disks/OS reboot OK.

Cheers,
Peter

grep "Dquot-cache hash table" syslog | awk '{print $1,$2,$3}' | tail -n 20
Aug 6 09:04:34
Aug 6 17:16:41
Aug 7 09:50:31
Aug 8 18:25:25
Aug 8 22:02:14
Aug 9 16:18:41
Aug 10 18:41:47
Aug 11 08:33:38
Aug 17 12:18:24
Aug 13 17:21:06
Aug 14 08:11:51
Aug 14 18:23:30
Aug 14 20:38:13
Aug 15 16:59:58
Aug 21 02:16:06
Aug 17 22:02:15
Aug 16 20:42:10
Aug 19 13:57:42
Sep 4 18:38:03
Aug 28 07:09:02



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