Quote:
Originally Posted by ixtab
Errrm... sorry. I'm actually running a few servers, and the discrepancy (without NTP) would usually be in the order of a few seconds (minutes, at most) per year.
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I wish. My machines here vary wildly, from a relatively sensible -0.15s/day to a hilariously awful 45.3s/day. Cheap oscillators are pretty damn bad at keeping time, and a lot of machines have very cheap oscillators. I note that I have a pendulum clock that is a better timekeeper than the most reliable general-purpose computer I own...
Paying through the nose doesn't help either, because everyone expects you to be running NTP. My employer sells some ridiculously expensive megadollar hardware, and I was having fun repeatedly crashing one a few weeks ago while tracking down a bug. I happened to look at its NTP driftfile. ntp shows it losing 4s a day... the machine costs well over a million dollars and they used an oscillator for its clock that would shame a cheap wristwatch. (Because NTP works so very well that unless your machine is off the net or spends a year powered down nobody cares if the machine's hardware clock is hopeless.)