🚀 go-pugleaf

My linux machine can't tell the time properly.

When I boot up, linux correctly sets the time from the motherboard
clock. Things run normally, for _roughly_ a day, until I realise that
linux is now showing a completely different time.

As far as I can tell, the problem has existed since I installed linux
on the machine (about three months back), but since I was rebooting
frequently in those early days I couldn't be sure. I'm using redhat
3.0.3, upgraded to kernel 2.0.6. The problem persisted through the
upgrade.


This is what I know about the problem: 
- the time is jumping  backwards, because sometimes the date is 
  one day behind; 
- it happens regardless if anyone is logged in or not; 
- the relative time difference doesn't correspond to cron jobs, etc.; 
- the relative difference between 'linux-time' and 'real-time' is not
  the same each time this happens.


And I suspect: 
- the time is actually being reset to 0:00, rather than jumping to a
  'random' time; 
- it's not a hardware problem, since after rebooting things a fine
  for a while; 
- the jump occurs exactly once after each restart.


Has anyone seen or heard of anything like this before?  Any advice or
help would be appreciated (other than telling me to reinstall
everything - I'm not wimping out on this one!)

Thanks, Rupert.


-- 
___________________________________________________________________
Rupert Littlewood                         Graduate Student in Maths 
rupert@maths.usyd.edu.au                          Sydney University