[ale] Time jumping forward on RHEL6.3

Tue Nov 20 12:14:55 EST 2012

Interesting you mention VMs - the first question RedHat asked me was whether these are Virtual or Bare Metal (they are the latter).   The tech indicated he'd seen some sort of issues with virtual machines in the past but didn't elaborate.

I'm wondering if it could have something to do with CPU frequency and if so how I'd go about checking that.

Can you tell me what version of ntp you're running on RHEL6.3?  I'm running the latest which is ntp.x86_64 4.2.4p8-2.el6.

I don't really thing it's an ntp issue though since it seems to have gone even further off after ntpd died yesterday.

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jim Kinney
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 11:35 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Time jumping forward on RHEL6.3

Very strange. None of the rhel 6.3's I have are showing this at all. Then again, they are all VMs so things are quite different.

I have not seen it on any of the Centos 6.3 physical systems either. Keep us posted.

Take a B meson counter and turn it on. You may be having an issue with time reversal asymmetries :-)

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/11/particle-physicists-confirm-arrow-of-time-for-b-mesons.html

On 11/20/2012 11:26 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
Last week I noticed the time on two new servers we installed with RHEL6.3 had jumped forward even though we had ntpd running and use local time sources here.  I reconfigured ntp then with RedHat's GUI for same then verified the hwclock was updated (and not using UTC) then for good measure rebooted both to make sure the system time was still correct.

Yesterday morning I had set myself a reminder to re-verify and time was still OK on both servers.  I again rebooted to verify the system time was set properly on boot.

We were installing new software and it suggested adding the "-x" option to ntpd which we did and restarted ntpd.   I again verified time was still ok after that.

Last night I noticed that at some point the time had again leapt forward as it had last week.   This was by about 9 hours and 14 minutes.   It appears ntpd aborted (presumably due to the -x option that prevents skewing) due to large gap in time (720000).

This morning both servers are ahead by about 20 hours on system time even though ntpd has not been running since yesterday's abort.

I've looked through all cron and anacron files and can't find anything that would be setting time automatically.

A ticket has been opened with RedHat support but I'm wondering if anyone has seen something like this and has any ideas what might be causing it or how to prevent it.  We'll be running cluster software on these two nodes so having time synchronizes is especially important.

We do run many other RHEL (4, 5 & 6) servers as well as HP-UX and Windows servers and workstations all using our internal time devices as the NTP time source so I'm mystified as to why these two servers have the issue.

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