On Fri, Jun 08, 2007 at 10:38:00PM -0400, Richard Freeman wrote: > I just noticed that my time was off and after checking the logs I saw that > ntpd was adjusting the time by 5 minutes several times a day for the last > month. > > Searching around I found some hints that disabling apic might help. This is > on a K8V deluxe motherboard and running 2.6.20-r7. Before I disable apic, > will this have any negative > effects on the system? This is a desktop system so I don't really care about > power-saving features (although I'd like to keep cpudyn working if possible). > > I'm also running ivtv (mythtv backend) which apparently can cause clock skew > due to some kind of DMA error, but I'm not seeing that in the logs. > > Any advice?
First, in general, both openntpd and ntpd are cranky little beasties. For a service that should be as basic and reliable as, say, ssh, an NTP installation requires a tremendous amount of ongoing TLC -- daemons randomly die or get wedged, or just fail to update the time correctly. Sometimes they actively skew a machine's time off. Second, the worst problems I ever saw with NTP weren't actually NTP's fault. I had a box which lost 15m/day, and (surprise surprise) NTP couldn't keep up and kept erroring out. It was an amd64 box that was (for reasons unbeknownst to me) installed x86, which I thought was the problem. Turns out it was bad RAM. The box ran for months as a postgresql server using that RAM, but NTP? No-can-do. Go figure. Dustin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
