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

Sun Nov 22 06:02:56 UTC 2009
Brian Mathis <brian.mathis at gmail.com>

On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 12:19 AM, ankush grover <ankushcentos at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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


Because you are using VMware you must become very familiar with how
timekeeping works on computer systems.  VMware has some helpful guides
on this:
    http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1006427
    http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf