Recently a machine I set up with Gentoo linux started having its hardware clock drift quite wildly. In the morning it could be up to half an hour out. This was caused by a severe skew with the hardware clock and the system clock (or the BIOS clock and linux clock respectively). So to fix this I did two things, 1 install ntpd and 2 fix the hwclock.
Installing ntpd was quite easy:
# emerge net-misc/ntp
# nano -w /etc/conf.d/ntpd
Fill in the server you want, you can use the links specified for a list of servers.
# /etc/init.d/ntpd start
If no errors are reported go on, else see if something silly has happened (e.g. typo in /etc/conf.d/ntpd).
# rc-update add ntpd default
Next I fixed adjtime and set the h/w clock correctly:
# rm /etc/adjtime
# date MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]
(e.g. date 100912002002 for 12:00pm 10/9/2002)
Finally I set the h/w clock with the system time.
#hwclock --utc --systohc
Comments
Ruben
Posted at 2003-10-01 5:32 a.m.
I tried this but it's not working can you tell me if this will work if my /etc/localtime links to /etc/zoneinfo/US/Central or do I have to change that too
Curtis
Posted at 2006-04-05 4:28 p.m.
By the way, to avoid clock conflicts if your machine is a dual-boot with Window$, you should set your hwclock to local, not utc. So the last command in your tutorial here should be:
#hwclock --local --systohc
Michael Twomey
Posted at 2006-10-16 2:39 p.m.
Wow, never noticed these comments, darn.
Ruben - no, the time zone should have no impact
Curtis - this is true if you dual boot. However I recommend using UTC if you aren't dual booting, as it solves a few nasty problems when daylight savings time changes.
