system clock misbehaving

[Ali Sobhi]

I've been struggling with system clock on my system since day 1 that I 
installed FC5.
I did not have any problems with FC4.

I stopped using NPTD for time sync, turned off most of the services, tried 
to look through
log files and can't find anything which tells me what is happening. I have 
not turned off any cron or anacron activities yet.

Here is what I'm seeing with regard to system clock. After about 48 to 56 
hours of up time, the system slows down,
no apparent memory or CPU hog on the queue. The response time goes up for 
a simple date or ls command.

looking at "/proc/driver/rtc" and date output, there is about 8+ hours 
difference which normally happens within very
short period of time (~ 4 hours). Continuously typing date, I can see the 
clock going back and forth. "sleep 1" takes about couple of 
minutes to complete. My only solution so far has been to do the following 
twice and then "sync; reboot -f"

ntpdate <MyTimeServer>
rm -f /etc/adjtime
hwclock -w

After this, everything seems OK until another 48 to 56 hours. I'm thinking 
about putting this in a cron job and rebooting the machine
every morning.

I have to mention that I have two different type of machines that have 
been up and running for 32 days now without any time problem and both
are using NTPD.

any pointers to where to look for source of problem and/or additional info 
 would be helpful.

Regards,

Ali Sobhi
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Sr. Consultant - IBM Research
Human Ability and Accessibility Center
512-823-0064 (T/L 793)              sobhi at us.ibm.com
                      http://www.ibm.com/able/
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