Clock running slow

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

I setup a machine for a friend and every few days I ssh in to see how
things look.  Twice now I have found the date about twenty minutes behind.
The first time I found this I ran ntpdate, made sure the hwclock was
updated, restarted ntp-simple and thought the problem was fixed.  I just
checked again and it's twenty minutes slow again.  The machine has not been
restarted for ten days.

This is on an old Dell PIII machine.

What steps should I follow to reset the clock (and hwclock)?  Do I need to
remove or reset a drift file?  What could cause the clock to get that far
behind while ntpd is running?

I can see that ntp is running from ps, and I see the drift file being
written to (just a few minutes ago):

$ ls -l /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root            7 Dec  4 20:08 /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift

although /var/log/ntpstats/loopstats is old (maybe that's run once a day?)

-rw-r--r--    2 root     root         1423 Dec  3 01:03 loopstats

Thanks,



-- 
Bill Moseley
mailto:moseley@hank.org