time of day warning

Eric Eisenhart eric at eisenhart.com
Mon May 13 09:02:07 PDT 2002


On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 09:46:24PM -0700, Lorie Obal wrote:
> I'm working on rebuilding my LAN from scratch with new distros & a new 
> desktop box.  When I use ping I get:Warning: time of day goes back, taking 
> countermeasures.
> 
> What is this reference and what are the countermeasures?

I believe the basic problem is in the kernel.  Something where the system
call to get how many microseconds have gone by would sometimes return a
value and then the next call returned a lower value (instead of higher),
which isn't correct unless your computer travels back in time.

The countermeasures are probably some kind of workaround that leaves the
times printed by ping less accurate.

I suggest upgrading your kernel to the latest available for your
distribution.

"apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade"
"up2date"
"red-carpet"
whatever...

In fact, in general I highly recommend that everybody consider a new
installation incomplete until the patches/upgrades/updates/errata available
at the time of install are all done.  (I mean this for Debian, RedHat any
other Linux distro, any non-Linux *nix and even for Windows)
-- 
    Eric Eisenhart   Freedom is slavery.      http://eric.eisenhart.com/
 ^  ICQ#: 48217244   Ignorance is strength.   eric-dot-sig at eisenhart.com
/e\ Perl&SQL Coder   War is peace.            IRC Nicks: Falsch Freiheit
---                        -- George Orwell



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