4/330 time problems
Keith S. Pickens
ksp at maxwell.nde.swri.edu
Wed Nov 15 02:57:38 AEST 1989
On Nov 13, 11:45am, dupuy at cs.columbia.edu wrote:
= We run NTP, and it seems only to be able to keep the clock within about
= 100 ms of our local secondary time servers. So there's still some bad
= stuff happening with them thar clocks.
I have a 4/370 (same cpu as a 4/330) which has a discontinuous clock. I
have watched the offset of the clock vs. a stable reference with ntp. I
see a slow drift, which is to be expected, with one second jumps
superimposed on it. These jumps occur about every 225-235 minutes. I
have checked another machine (4/330) and observered the same `effect'.
The net result is that the system time is badly broken. You can't
stablize it with ntp and I would expect that it will break things in weird
and wondrous ways.
Here is the test setup:
4/370
/
/
time server
Sun 3/180
\
\
4/280
The same measurement was run on both the 4/280 (SunOS 4.0.1) and on the
4/370 (SunOS 4.0.3). The 4/280 shows only a slow drift relative to the
reference system. The 4/370 shows a slow drift and 1 second jumps
relative to the reference system. This indicates that the problem is in
the 4/370 clock and not in the time server.
The same source code was used to build ntp on both the 4/370 and 4/280.
This has been pending with Sun software support for over a month. Here is
the feedback I got a couple of weeks ago:
>From Sun (31 Oct 89):
= This problem has been assigned bugid number 1029022. Engineering is looking
= at the problem as a possible problem with the Sun-4/330 software and/or
= hardware. At this time, I can give you no other status information nor
= schedule for the resolution of the problem.
-keith
ksp at maxwell.nde.swri.edu
maxwell!ksp
PS: I have some nice data on this problem. If anyone wants it send me mail.
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