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

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Antos Andras <antos@szit.bme.hu> wrote:

> 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. 

Have you any programs installed that are involved with setting the
system clock? chrony, adjtimex, ntpdate and ntp are candidates that come
to my mind, but there may be more, some have their own daemons, some
work with cron jobs.

> All these start happening only when I am logged in locally (I think).

It would be good to find that out. If your computer has access to an
external clock, you could check this regularly and write it into a log
file, e.g. with something like

while true; do
  links -dump www.uhrzeit.org |grep "Die Uhrzeit" >> /var/log/mytime.log
  date >> /var/log/mytime.log
  wait $appropriate_time
done

or a cron job.

> 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.

No idea. 

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie