On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 4:08 PM, Paul Lussier<p.luss...@comcast.net> wrote: > After the clock gets about an hour (maybe it's 2) out of sync, ntpd > fails to sync and gives up. Is this a system clock battery problem ?
It shouldn't be the battery. In a standard IBM pee cee, the battery clock is only used to set the system clock during POST. After that, the battery clock is not used, unless the OS specifically asks for it. The tool to do that under Linux is "hwclock". You may want to compare the output of "date" and "hwclock", especially over time. Historically, a system clock that was loosing time was often a sign of high interrupt load. The system clock on a PC is advanced by the timer interrupt (IRQ0), which "ticks" 18 times a second. If the system is spending a lot of time in interrupt service routines with other interrupts masked, the system clock will miss enough ticks to make a difference. You used to see this a lot with NetWare 3.x systems, circa 1990. I don't know if that problem can still happen with modern systems or with Linux. /proc/interrupts will give you counters, but I don't know what "a lot" would be. Given the age of the system, there is a real chance that the hardware which drives the system clock is starting to fail. You may be able to compensate by having a cron job fire once per minute and run "hwclock --hctosys". That's a kludge at best, but it may be okay for some situations. -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
