[CentOS] system time automatically fowards in time and then comes back to normal

Sun Nov 22 05:19:48 UTC 2009
ankush grover <ankushcentos at gmail.com>

Hi friends,

I am running Nagios 2.7-1 on Centos 5.0 32-bit hosted on Vmware ESX
4.0. The issue I am seeing on the server is sometimes nagios is
showing the below messages in /var/log/messages and as the system time
gets changed some false alarms gets generated. I searched it on the
google but I am not able to find the correct solution. I even posted
on the nagios forum and they asked me to see elsewhere why the server
shitfs so much before looking at nagios.


Nov 21 20:37:12 linuxmonitoring nagios: Warning: A system time change
of 4398 seconds (forwards in time) has been detected.  Compensating...
Nov 21 19:23:54 linuxmonitoring nagios: Warning: A system time change
of 4398 seconds (backwards in time) has been detected.  Compensating..


Earlier this server was syncing time through ntp daemon and below is
the ntp.conf file. Now I have set a cronjob which sync the time with
the ntp server every 5 minutes but still the problem persist.

ntp.conf file


restrict default ignore
restrict 127.0.0.1
driftfile /var/lib/ntp/drift
broadcastdelay 0.008
#authenticate yes
keys /etc/ntp/keys
restrict 172.16.6.3 nomodify notrap noquery
server 172.16.6.3
restrict 172.16.6.2 nomodify notrap noquery
server 172.16.6.2

Please see the output of hwclock and date at the same time.
hwclock
Sat 21 Nov 2009 08:19:02 PM IST  -0.496922 seconds

date
Sat Nov 21 20:19:55 IST 2009


Please advice what I need to do to fix this error.


Regards

Ankush