On Wed, 09 Feb 2005 11:21, Volker Kuhlmann wrote:
> > (OT) Why does my computer gain 15 seconds a day? It's rarely turned
> > off.
>
> Bad quality crystal oscillators on the mobo. Their drift can easily be
> or exceed 15s/day. Lacking any better source of time, the kernel can
> only assume that a) some crystal oscillator runs at a fixed frequency,
> and b) that frequency is in fact what it is supposed to. There's nothing
> one can do about a), that's how things work, and b) won't ever happen in
> reality.
[ etc., etc. all good stuff ]
A part of the manual page for hwclock says:-
The Adjust Function
The Hardware Clock is usually not very accurate. However, much of
its inaccuracy is
completely predictable - it gains or loses the same amount of time
every day. This is
called systematic drift. hwclock's "adjust" function lets you make
systematic correc-
tions to correct the systematic drift.
======
for the whole story read the man page.
It's actually possible for mere mortals to understand this one.
Also there is gobs and gobs of guff at:-
http://www.ntp.org/
and particularly
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html
The other thing I have found is that if one dual boots with that other o/s,
while on the 'Net it interferes with the crystal with out any authorization,
whatsoever setting it to the PST8PDT timezone. ( Isn't that criminal
behaviour about which there is a law? ). It causes untold strife to clock
settings.
--
Sincerely etc.,
Christopher Sawtell
