System Clock (fwd)

[Kevin Buettner]

On Feb 7,  5:56am, Nathan Saper wrote:

> OK, here's my problem: My system clock is ALWAYS wrong, and I can't figure
> out what to do to fix it.  I've tried using timetool, I've tried setting
> the time through the BIOS, all to no avail.  No matter what, as soon as I
> reboot, the time gets all screwed up again.  Any suggestions?

After you reboot, set the approximate time via the date command.
(I'll assume that you know how to do this.)  After you've done that,
do "/sbin/hwclock --systohc" to update the the clock in your firmware.

If after rebooting, you find that you're always (about) the same
number of hours off you'll want to check to make sure your time
zone is set properly.  Also check to see if you're saving the
time to the firmware as GMT or local time.  (You probably want
local time -- though it doesn't much matter so long as you
fetch it the same way that you saved it.)

Finally, as Mike Sheldon mentioned, xntpd is a really nice utility for
keeping your system's time synchronized with the outside world.  It is
important, however, to get reasonably close to the actual time or
xntpd will refuse to work.  (You can do an ntpdate prior to starting
xntpd to solve this problem.)  You can either go to the web site
that Mike mentions or you can just install off your distribution's
CD.

Kevin

-- 
Kevin Buettner
kev@primenet.com, kevinb@redhat.com