Re: Updating and displaying CMOS clock

Ian Smith wrote:
>  > 
>  > What's the command to update the CMOS clock to the time of the kernel
>  > clock? 
>  > 
>  > ntpd does a good job of keeping the accurate time in the kernel clock,
>  > but from my experience, this time is not propagated to the CMOS clock
>  > which lives its own life. As a result, there is a large time skew
>  > everytime the box is rebooted, which prevents from Kerberos login
>  > until the kernel clock is synchronized.
> 
> That shouldn't be happening.  There may be some hardware problem with 
> your RTC if you haven't messed with the sysctl settings (see below).  
> Could be a borderline battery, poor quality 32768Hz timebase or ..

Yes, the RTC in that box is not good, therefore the problem. Last time
I rebooted, it had drifted maybe 10-15 minutes for a period of several
months' uptime.

>  > In other words, what's the FreeBSD equivalent of the Linux 
>  > "hwclock --systohc" command? 
> 
> People have pointed out incantations with date that will do the job, but 
> it really shouldn't be necessary.
> 
>  > And no, contrary to popular belief, the correction of the CMOS clock
>  > does not happen automatically in FreeBSD even if ntpd is running.
> 
> Yes, it does.  Has since 2.2.6 anyway, whether or not ntpd is running.

Sorry, I doubt that.

> 
> In 8.x /var/log/messages gets spammed with RTC update messages every 
> half hour, if you had booted with verbose messages:
> 
> Jul  7 19:34:41 t23 ntpd[65982]: kernel time sync status change 6001
> Jul  7 19:45:29 t23 ntpd[65982]: kernel time sync status change 2001
> Jul  7 19:46:22 t23 kernel: ts_to_ct(1404762382.687179418) = [2014-07-07 19:46:22]

I see ntpd acting here.

> In 9.x there's a new sysctl debug.clocktime to enable such verbosity; I 
> turned it on about 3 hours ago after seeing this thread, suspended and 
> resumed to confirm it working, then restarted ntpd for good measure:

I don't run ntpd on that box, just ntpdate hourly.

[dd]

> 
> Do these match yours?  And set sysctl debug.clocktime=1 and report back.  

On a 8.4-RELEASE box, I have set sysctl debug.clocktime=1 and waited
for three hours with no trace of any adjustment to the RTC. During
these three hours, ntpdate has been run three times.

However, as soon as I did "sysctl `sysctl -e machdep.adjkerntz`", I
received the following in /var/log/messages:

Jul  7 21:28:34 <kern.crit> fw kernel: ts_to_ct(1404743314.713060410) = [2014-07-07 14:28:34]

What is the conclusion? I think if you are not running ntpd, the only way
to adjust the RTC is running "sysctl `sysctl -e machdep.adjkerntz`".

-- 
Victor Sudakov,  VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN
sip:sudakov@sibptus.tomsk.ru
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