the only things that may be of interest in this case are that I was
running 'sup -s -v' (for the first time. it was taking all day), and that
I think the internal clock battery may be dead. Which I didn't think would
be an issue as long as I didn't unplug the machine.

The 5 minutes per quarter hour was a conservative estimate. I noticed the
problem when I checked the time and it was 90 minutes behind! Even with
ntpdate being called via cron hourly. I guess that makes sense if cron
called it on the hour and if it takes progressively longer to reach that
hour mark. 8)

--glen

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On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, John wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> > I understand the problems old macs have with losing time as described in
> > the FAQ, I just didn't think it would be this bad. I have a quadra 840av.
> > I set up a cron to run hourly with ntpdate:
> >      0 * * * * /usr/sbin/ntpdate -s tick.usno.navy.mil tock.usno.navy.mil
> 
> You really should look for a stratum 2 server, as those stratum 1 servers
> are really only intended for updating stratum 2 servers. With accuracy of
> your clock as off as it is, I don't think the difference will ever be
> noticeable.
> 
> You're welcome to use mine: reva.sixgirls.org and/or gaia.sixgirls.org
> 
> > I still noticed that my time was way off the closer I reached the top of
> > the hour. I upped the cron time to run every 15 minutes. Watching the
> > syslog it appears I lose more than 5 minutes per quarter hour. Is that
> > normal? Does it depend on system load?
> 
> Five minutes per hour?!? I've not seen a Mac that far off - not even my
> Q840AV was that bad.
> 
> I did notice that on most of my Macs the amount of correction did become
> more consistent if I run something - as if idle time screws up time more
> than non idle. So I run the distributed.net client on all of my m68k Macs.
> There's even a separate listing for NetBSD/m68k (if you run OGR):
> http://stats.distributed.net/ogr-25/platformlist..php3?view=toc
> 
> > I didn't really want to run ntpd, but would I be better off doing that? I
> > don't want to ntpdate every minute, but I would like to have decently
> > accurate time. I'm curious what other people do to maintain accurate time.
> 
> I've heard that some systems won't run ntpd if the time is off too much  -
> that ntpd gets confused or something. Anyone else care to speak of
> experiences of running ntpd on machines with really screwed clocks?
> 
> John Klos
>