From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Mar 3 01:17:40 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 06B1A16A4CE for ; Thu, 3 Mar 2005 01:17:40 +0000 (GMT) Received: from ns1.tiadon.com (SMTP.tiadon.com [69.27.132.161]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A4AD843D54 for ; Thu, 3 Mar 2005 01:17:39 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from kdk@daleco.biz) Received: from [69.27.131.0] ([69.27.131.0]) by ns1.tiadon.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.211); Wed, 2 Mar 2005 19:18:57 -0600 Message-ID: <422665B1.7040807@daleco.biz> Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2005 19:17:37 -0600 From: Kevin Kinsey User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041210 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: LukeD@pobox.com References: <20050302102908.GF30896@alzatex.com> <42262D74.3050907@cwru.edu> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-OriginalArrivalTime: 03 Mar 2005 01:18:58.0348 (UTC) FILETIME=[F99BC6C0:01C51F8E] cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org cc: Tom Trelvik Subject: Re: Received mail timestamp is off by 7 hours X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2005 01:17:40 -0000 Luke wrote: >> That suggests larger problems on your system, to me, but I dunno. > > 3) If your clock tends to run noticably fast or slow, constant NTP > corrections > tend to do more harm than good, at least in my experience. It got to > where > I couldn't even run a buildworld because NTP kept tinkering with the > clock > in the middle of the process. > > You're right. This machine did have serious problems. The clock was > wild. > Using the NTP daemon to try to correct it just aggravated the situation > because calibration was just about impossible. This occurs on some machines (older ones in my experience) because FreeBSD (I guess) selects the wrong type of hardware timecounter for the CPU it's on. Now, it's likely that it's really the hardware's fault, but changing the sysctl "kern.timecounter.hardware" to another value (`sysctl kern.timecounter.choice` will give you options) has worked for me on at least two different occasions when we faced this problem. IIRC, one was an old AMD K6-2/475 on an Asus P5-A mobo; the other was an original Pentium, but I don't know the mobo model off the top of my head. HTH, Kevin Kinsey