Unwanted (wrong) time change

[michele]

Hi.
I installed fedora 9 live on a PC after a disk crash (previwsly was fc6). I installed all the software I need, and where possible I took the old configuration file from a backup I did some time ago.

Now the system apepar to work as before, but I noticed that sometime the time changes automatically, to a wrong time (only few hours from the right one, with same timezone). I am not sure, but I think it changes not only at boot time.

"chkconfig" say that "ntpd" and "ntpdate" are off on all runlevel (as information the system normally work on run level 3). Moreover the system is not connected to the internet; it is wired, but the proxy is not configured, and the result is that outside address are not reachable.

I am going out crazy trying to understand what is periodically changing the time. It is important for me that the time is correct, becouse this PC should be a time server for others in the network.

Thanks for any suggestion will arrive.

Michele

[bob]

(moved to EOL)

[stoat]

If the time change is in increments of hours, then it might be a GMT offset caused by Fedora being configured to use UTC instead of local time. Especially if this machine boots more than one operating system, and another system is configured to use local time. I have purposely tried to forget all about Fedora 9, but I'm sure the Date and Time applet will have a checkbox for UTC in the Time Zone tab. It won't hurt anything to look.

[michele]

I am considering the possibility of a hardware fault.

Fedora 9 is the only operative system installed on that PC, and in any case the time does not change at boot time (not only at boot time, and not at every boot time).

I tried several reboot in the past days, without any changes in the time. But often when I log into the system after some days, I found a wrong time.

Michele

[Laserman]

If this is an older machine that uses a battery on the motherboard that may be failing and causing bad reads at boot up.

[michele]

This is possible.

I have just seen that the software running on PC, try to set the time sometimes, so it seems that the problem was allready on the old installation (FC6), but it was "solved" by sincronizing the clock manually with another PC. After I installed the new system, this "workaround" stopped to work, until i set the userid of command "date".

I log every time "date" is invoked, and I saw something like:
...
[11-02-2010 18.15] date
[00-00-0000 00.00] date -s 021118152010
[11-02-2010 18.15] date
...

Michele