[PLUG] ntpd and subnet

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Tue Jun 24 17:49:20 UTC 2014


   The ethernet-connected hosts here have static IP addresses. The wireless
access point serves dynamic IP addresses on a different subnet. Only two
portables use the WAP and both have a time keeping issue: each machine gains
time and can get days ahead.

   While many of us wish we could gain time so everything can be
accomplished, for the computers it is not desired. One laptop, a Toshiba
Satellite running Slackware-14.1 booted and thought it was Thursday, June
26th, and 5:17 pm when it was only an hour ago. I reset the date and time,
ran 'hwclock -w' to set the hardware clock to the system time, and shut
down. Realizing that the reason users cannot run alsamixer was not having
their usernames in the audio group, I rebooted. The system gagged because
the last time /dev/sda1 was checked was Thursday the 26th and now it is
Tuesday the 24th and it doesn't know how to deal with back to the past. That
was fixed by running 'e2fsck -v -y' and waiting.

   So, now the kernel is happy, and I need to figure out why only the two
portables that connect to the 'Net wirelessly through the WAP keep gaining
time. I've set up one of the laptops to use na.pool ntp servers but it still
keeps gaining time. My Web searches and thread on linuxquestions.org have
produced no solution for the one laptop; just this morning I saw the second
has the same problem and realized the common factor is wireless
connectivity.

   Any ideas of why only the portables connecting via the WAP keep gaining
time would be much appreciated. Also, any diagnostics or tests I can run to
isolate the source of the problem would be good.

TIA,

Rich




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