[NCLUG] automatic date update?

[Michael Dwyer]

Look in each of the /etc/cron.[daily|weekly|monthly|etc] directories for 
anything.  However, I believe that KRUD out of the box doesn't do 
anything to maintain time.  Does this happen weekly when your box is 
alive for weeks for a time, or do you reboot this machine regularly? 
Linux boxes, if misconfigured, can be confused about the time when they 
boot -- especially on dual-boot windows boxes.  Windows doesn't grasp 
the idea of using UTC time on the CMOS clock, while UNIX usually expects 
that to be the case.   Also, Windows sets the clock for daylight savings 
time -- unix boxes don't have DST, per se, and only change the apparent 
offset.

Does it change your clock when you reboot?
Does it change your clock slowly?  A couple minutes per day, or in one 
large step?
How does the CMOS clock ('hwclock') match up with your system clock 
('date')?

ntpdate and netdate are one-off programs that set the software clock 
once when ran.  ntpd, on the other hand, runs constantly, and carefully 
adjusts your clock against a pool of online clocks.  It works very 
nicely if you have a constant internet connection.

The concept of linux time is something I've done a lot of work on, so I 
should be able to help you find this one....  hopefully...

Daniel Miles wrote:
> You might be running a date/time updater (like ntpdate) that can keep
> its own schedule outside the crond. Check your init.d and rcX.d to see
> if there is something that gets started at boot.
> 
> These things (the date/time updaters) can be really neat if you
> configure them for your area because they update to atomic time every so
> often (mine updates once a week and I typically find that I'm around 30
> seconds off). That way you'd know that your system always had the
> correct time.
> 
> On Mon, 2002-11-11 at 10:25, Tom Peterson wrote:
> 
>>My Redhat 7.x (KRUD) workstation automatically resets system date/time to
>>universal time (=GMT?) periodically.  I think it's happening once a week.  I
>>haven't found anything other than mailman in the /var/spool/cron directory.
>>Does anyone have any suggestions for finding the system date update process?
>>Thanks.