[Sussex] NTP Weirdness

[John D.]

On Wednesday 23 April 2008 14:11:03 Michael-John Turner wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 12:44:45PM +0100, Steve Dobson wrote:
> > The system is a duel Pentium 4 2.6GHz running Debian (Etch) 4.0.  I've
> > installed ntp to keep the clock up to date but it drifts badly, racing
> > the clock ahead of real time by tens of minutes per day.
>
> To be honest, I've only ever seen NTP weirdness with a Sun Ultra 2 that had
> a faulty RTC - the time would fluctuate badly and it didn't hold time
> between reboots. Switching to OpenNTPD helped a bit, but it was ultimately
> a hardware issue.
>
> Does your system perhaps have hyperthreading enabled? I know that it can
> cause havoc with NTPD.
Well Steve isn't the only one that has some "debian related" weirdness in 
respect of this.

I'm runnin "Sidux", which is debian SID. I get it slightly differently though. 
It doesn't matter which online time server I select it keeps setting my clock 
10 minutes slow.

I tend to notice it after I've run the "smxi" updating script. It doesn't 
matter how often I change the region/area to reflect London, it seems to 
default it back to Guernsey for UK time.

I don't know if this is exactly the same problem that Steve is experiencing, 
but I certainly don't have any hyper-threading, because it's running on a 2 
gig pentium 4 so I'm thinking that if it is a common problem it could 
possibly be debian related.

Apart from that, I have no idea about the possible technicalities too look 
at - as I still qualify (and probably will always) as "nugget"! :D

regards

John D.