I have an Asus A7N8X-E Delux, which is notorious for being the time to drift. The time server that was installed suring setup didn't help, so I stopped it and tried to set up a crontab but that also doesn't seem to help. I tried to reinstall the time server thinking that maybe it got screwed up on install, but still no good.

Does anyone have any ideas? The box works great except for that one problem...

/tk

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R5D1, PVR350, ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe, AMD 2200+, SB Live.

what are you puting in your crontab?

I have this in mine:

1 0,6 * * * root ntpdate <stratum2 timeserver>

And it works fine to keep the clock fron drifting.

stratum 2 servers:
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/clock2a.html

Try setting the with ntpdate from the command line, does it work?

Search the forum here for messages from "tjc" with the terms "time drift" (or try other search terms). He posted a year or two back on some lilo option that worked to solve the time drift. When I tried it it messed up one of my capture cards, but then removing it and rebooting fixed the drift.

Off the wiki (this is what I have):



Yeah, that works, but, the drift is about one minute every 2 hours. I would need to exit out to the command line quite often to fix the problem.



what is this period you have synching it. i don't know much about linux coding and I'm learning as I go.

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R5D1, PVR350, ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe, AMD 2200+, SB Live.

i found this:


If this is what you were referring to, I'll try it at home tonight.

thanks for everyone's help...

/tk

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R5D1, PVR350, ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe, AMD 2200+, SB Live.

From memory, the Asus board you're using has an NForce 2 chipset. This is a well documented problem. The easiest way I found to solve it is to turn OFF spectrum spread in the BIOS.

The root of this is the Kernal is causing too many APIC signals (I think - from memory again) which is why the --noapic noioapic thing works.

It solved my time drift on my abit board.

edit-- That should be the FSB (front side bus) spread spectrum. -I've now had a chance to check.

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Version:R8
Intel C2D 7400, Nvidia 5600 via HDMI to Samsung B37B650TW (PAL), Asus P5QL-E mobo, 4Gb PC6400 DDR2 ram, Samsung Spinpoint 500 Gb & 1Tb drive, Nova-HD-S2 (x2)

thanks, i'll try this out tonight

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R5D1, PVR350, ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe, AMD 2200+, SB Live.

My crontab entry is for 1 minute after midnight and 1 minute after 6 am everyday.

Do a "man 5 crontab" for what the fields are.
(I have do this for long time and still have to look it up to remember)

So, it seems to be keeping time.

one thing to note is that the append line had another argument splash=silent. after adding the two other arguments, my system seems to lock up about once every couple hours sitting idle. I just tried removing this other value and will see if not having that helps.

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R5D1, PVR350, ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe, AMD 2200+, SB Live.

everything seems ok. i'm gonna update the wiki for this. thanks for the help.

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R5D1, PVR350, ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe, AMD 2200+, SB Live.

I had to reboot my system yesterday due to my HD tuner card dying after tuning to a marginal signal-strength channel.

After reboot, my system (running R5C7) had the problem of the racing clock yet again. Only discovered it this morning after seeing that all of yesterday's recordings included 5-10 minutes of the previous show's ending. It had gained about 20 minutes over the course of probably 12 hours.

I've done the lilo append thing above, which if it acts as it's done in the past, will fix the time but kill a tuner card. I'll back out the lilo fixes, restart again, and the clock will be fine until some reboot in the future.

EDIT: Well, last time I didn't edit the "splash=silent" out of lilo.conf. THIS time I did, and none of my tuner cards seem to have died (and the time is holding so far).