[CLUE-Tech] clock skew

[Matt Gushee]

On Sun, Sep 15, 2002 at 01:51:48PM -0600, David Willson wrote:
> Man, could this clock skew be any worse?  I have two problems:
> 
> 1) If I suspend my laptop, it will sometimes set the hardware clock to
> UTC, which throws everything off by six hours.

Or you could say that setting it to local time throws everything off :-)
Seriously, though, setting it to UTC is the recommended practice, unless
you are running a broken OS that can't understand UTC (gee, I wonder
what OS that might be?). I'm not sure of all the reasons, but I think it
becomes particularly important in cases like, say, collaborating with
people in various places on software projects, where you need to make
sure everyone's time stamps are in sync.

> 2) My software clock loses a little over a second every minute.  Is
> there any way to tell Linux to just ~use~ and ~trust~ the hardware
> clock?  I am lucky enough to have one that works pretty well; it seems a
> shame to waste it.

I'm sure there is, but I forget how. My suggestion would be, if your
machine is frequently connected to the network, use 'ntpdate' (which you
might need to install). You can then sync your clock every day to, say,
time.nist.gov, which is the official US atomic clock up in Boulder.

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee at havenrock.com
http://www.havenrock.com/