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