[arch-general] apcupsd or rtkit - Caused time to go haywire on shutdown/reboot??

[Leonid Isaev]

On (10/19/11 14:19), David C. Rankin wrote:
-~> On 10/18/2011 04:33 PM, Leonid Isaev wrote:
-~> >-~>    That's 3 spontaneous reboots in 11 minutes. Something is really off.
-~> >-~>
-~> >-~>  --
-~> >-~>  David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
-~> >
-~> >Nothing puzzling here: the kernel is working correctly but your RTC is wrong
-~> >(no idea how this could happen though). If by "spontaneous" you mean "no errors
-~> >in the logs", then it's a hardware problem. As a first step, I would kill
-~> >apcupsd and get rid of UPS.
-~> 
-~> No errors in the logs, to the RTC looks like the culprit. After
-~> fixing the RTC, I haven't experienced any more of the reboots.
-~> Bizarre... This box has run fine for years, then following the
-~> power outage, the RTC went nuts. I think that was simply the
-~> issue. However, I don't think we will ever explain why the RTC
-~> became an issue that caused the reboots. Looking at all the logs,
-~> the RTC has been all over the place this past month:
-~> 
-~> Oct 19 13:15:02 providence crond[955]: time disparity of 301 minutes detected
-~> Oct 18 12:42:00 providence crond[958]: time disparity of -479 minutes detected
-~> Oct 18 12:32:00 providence crond[1180]: time disparity of -479 minutes detected
-~> Oct 18 11:19:01 providence crond[978]: time disparity of -479 minutes detected
-~> Oct 18 09:44:01 providence crond[953]: time disparity of -478 minutes detected
-~> Oct 12 09:24:01 providence crond[942]: time disparity of -79 minutes detected
-~> Oct  7 10:55:59 providence crond[964]: time disparity of 253 minutes detected
-~> Oct  5 07:55:57 providence crond[921]: time disparity of 383 minutes detected
-~> Oct  3 16:23:01 providence crond[954]: time disparity of 301 minutes detected
-~> 
-~> 300 is correct for the 5 hour offset for CDT, I can't explain the
-~> wild swings from Oct 3 to Oct 18. That is a 862 minute difference
-~> between Oct 5 and Oct 18. init scripts? kernels?
-~> 
-~> The other box that experienced this problem had the following:
-~> 
-~> Oct  5 08:27:32 localhost crond[789]: time disparity of -546 minutes detected
-~> Sep 27 22:18:01 localhost crond[794]: time disparity of -475 minutes detected
-~> 
-~> both those dates must have been kernel updates, because that is
-~> the only time that box gets restarted. Strange, thanks for your
-~> help.
-~> 
-~> -- 
-~> David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.

OK. But few remarks:
(1) Crond or any other program including syslog must use
the current timezone unless you specifically instructed it to use UTC, so 5h
offsets are not fine. The rtkit stuff IS A BUG related to chroot being unable
to set a correct TZ.

(2) Either your motherboard is hosed or the RTC battery is discharged. Do you
have a large time drift (like an hour per day) reported by the hwclock? If you
have time offsets only when rebooted, I think the second option is more
likely.

-- 
Leonid Isaev
GnuPG key ID: 164B5A6D
Key fingerprint: C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE  775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D
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