Bug#252289: general: system clock goes chaoticly causing system breakdown

[Antos Andras <antos@szit.bme.hu>]

Package: general
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks the whole system, causes serious data loss

I file this against general, because I have no idea which package is to
blame (kernel-image,glibc,util-linux?), so feel free to reassign this
according to your expertise.

On one of my Debian boxes, the system clock goes chaoticly. Logging in
locally, the system clock goes too fast, by up to 150 sec in an hour.
After a while it stops or it goes around on a loop of 3-4 secs. This
causes, e.g., X to freeze. Then sometimes I can switch to VT and kill
services and processes. Sometimes after a while the VT access also freezes
and the system breaks down (though sometimes I could still login through
ssh). There are strange (and disturbing) symptoms of this clock behavour,
assumeable because many things need the clock, e.g. shutdown, sleep, etc.
does not work, and pc beeper beeps continuously.

All these start happening only when I am logged in locally (I think).
Can the reason be some hardware problem ? But the same PC did not show
problems earlier under Red Hat or Windows XP. I have never seen similar
thing on other Debian boxes I use.

I know that reproducing this bug can be difficult. I can give more
information like log files, dmesg, hardware, etc., if one tells me which
are relevant.

Some information:

$ uname -a
Linux ibm19 2.4.26-1-686 #3 Sun Apr 18 21:17:21 EST 2004 i686 GNU/Linux

ii  kernel-image-2.4.26-1-686    2.4.26-1     Linux kernel image for version 2.4.26 on PPro/Celeron/PII/PIII/PIV.
ii  libc6                        2.3.2.ds1-11 GNU C Library: Shared libraries and Timezone data
ii  ntpdate                      4.2.0a-8     The ntpdate client for setting system time from NTP servers
ii  base-config                  2.20         Debian base system configurator
ii  util-linux                   2.12-3       Miscellaneous system utilities
ii  coreutils                    5.0.91-2     The GNU core utilities
ii  modutils                     2.4.26-1     Linux module utilities
ii  debianutils                  2.8.1        Miscellaneous utilities specific t

Andras Antos

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.26-1-686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C