On 27/11/18 10:53 am, Rick Stevens wrote:
On 11/26/18 1:46 PM, Stephen Morris wrote:
On 21/11/18 10:02 am, Rick Stevens wrote:
On 11/20/18 2:09 PM, Ed Greshko wrote:
On 11/21/18 5:07 AM, Stephen Morris wrote:
Given that the front screen of the bios is displaying the time as
local time, presumably
that means that the time settings in the bios are local time and the
motherboard bios
doesn't provide any means to input the time as GMT, hence the bios
is not set to GMT.
Let me try this one last time. And it will be one last time. I can
tell you how to set
your system up to get consistent log entries. It will be your choice
to do it or not.
You have already said that the motherboard has no concept of time
zones. That is totally
irrelevant. YOU know what time it is and YOU know what time zone you
are in!
I look at my mobile phone and see it is 05:55 on November 21. I know
I am in GMT+8. So,
GMT time is now 21:55 on November 20. So, I go to my BIOS screen and
enter 21:55 as the
time and November 20 as the date. The motherboard clock is NOW set
to GMT! It matter not
one lick if the MB has an idea of any time zone!
Step one Done.
Thinking about the data as displayed by journalctl at boot time, the
time stamp on the
messages of Nov18 18:16 for a Nov 18 7am boot would make sense if
the OS assumed the
system clock was GMT and added the local zone offset to the time.
Given the fact that my /etc/adjtime has local as the last line, and
from my recollection
I have not explicitly run the indicated commands that would set
that, why is the OS not
honouring that specification right from boot commencement?
Set that last line to UTC. You have now told the O/S that the HW
clock is set to
UTC/GMT. So now the O/S knows what you know.
Step two Done.
Make sure the the link /etc/localtime points to a correct time zone
for where your system
is physically located.
[egreshko@meimei etc]$ ll /etc/localtime
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 33 Dec 21 2017 /etc/localtime ->
../usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Taipei
for ME.
(you can use timedatectl to show/set)
Step three Done.
Reboot
Done.
You will now get correct and consistent date/time stamps in your logs
going forwad.
Previous timestamps won't be fixed. Don't want to do that. Well,
you'll be in the same
situation you are now and that will be that.
With the time zone data coming from the tzdata package, are you
saying that each year
when the local governments change when daylight saving starts and
ends, that the tzdata
package is updated to reflect that?
Look at the changelog for the package as I showed you.
rpm -q --changelog tzdata
and you will see the dates it was updated and why it was updated.
The answer to your
question is obvious.
And to make it clear, Linux expects the SYSTEM clock to be in UTC,
Windows expects it to be in local time. The SYSTEM clock is set to the
BIOS clock at boot time for both OSes. There is really no (clean) way to
make these two disparate things live together. There is a way to bugger
Windows to use a UTC clock via a registry entry, but it's a kludge.
Choose which one (Windows or Linux) is your primary OS, and set your
BIOS clock accordingly (localtime for Windows, UTC for Linux).
At the moment my main OS is Windows as I spend a fair amount of time
playing online games that can't be played under Linux, so I mainly only
boot to Linux for email processing, until such time as I decide to forgo
the gaming environment and get back into serious development work. I
haven't investigated recently the ability of VM's to provide the
necessary hardware graphics quality for gaming, but the last time I
looked at this possibility the graphics capabilities weren't up to scratch.
Given that /etc/localtime seems to be a symbolic link to
/usr/share/zoneinfo, for the same reasons that /etc may not be mounted
/usr may also not be mounted, so how does the boot system know what
offset to add to the bios time to reach local time?
At boot time (when the logging starts), the system uses the hardware
clock to set the system clock, so all logs will be based on what the
hardware clock was set to (and the assumption is that it's UTC). All
log entries are stamped with the system clock value. Later, once /etc
and /usr are mounted, the logger NOW knows what your local timezone is
and the log entries will be DISPLAYED in your local timezone. The log
entries themselves (in the database) still are being tagged with the
system clock value.
Later on, chronyd drags the system clock into sync with UTC and the log
entries from then on have the correct UTC timestamp. However, they are
still displayed in your local timezone. journalctl has no idea when the
timestamps changed, so log entries made before chronyd did its thing
will be displayed with the wrong timestamp.
Linux will handle a localtime BIOS clock better. If your BIOS clock is
in local time (as Windows wants) and you boot Linux, the log entries
will have the incorrect time until chronyd drags the SYSTEM clock into
sync with UTC. The log entries will be correct from that point onwards.
So, use journalctl to look for log entries for chronyd:
journalctl -b -u chronyd
And look for the lines that indicate the clock was reset:
<datestamp> <hostname> chronyd<[pid]>: System clock was
stepped by <some-number> seconds
I've issued the command above and the last message displayed says that
the 'System clock TAI was stepped by 37 seconds', the first two messages
displayed, both with the same timestamp were 'Starting NTP client
server' and 'cronyd version 3.14 starting'. The thing that was
interesting about all the messages displayed by the journalctl command
was that the timestamp on all the messages was local time, which I
assume means that the system clock was running in local time before
cronyd was started?
Well, there are several things. You can think of it like that. If you
look closely, that the entries after that "stepped by" will be 37
seconds different than those before the "stepped by" entry.
Again, there really are two clocks. One, the hardware clock, is powered
by that little button battery on your mobo and runs continuously. The
second clock is the system clock and it's maintained by the operating
system. The hardware clock is used to set the system clock at boot time
and it's essentially ignored the rest of the time. This is true for both
Windows and Linux. The main difference is that Windows expects the
system clock to be in local time and Linux expects the system clock to
be in UTC.
Now, if your hardware clock is set to local time, your system clock is
also (initially) in local time and log entries are stamped with that
clock value. Regardless, journalctl will display things using your
timezone but it assumes the raw data in the database is stamped with a
UTC-based system clock. This explains why the times look wrong at this
point in the logs.
Once the system can determine what your timezone actually is and that
your hardware clock is in local time (the last line of /etc/adjtime says
"LOCAL" and not "UTC"), then it may do the computation for you and reset
your system clock to UTC so things make sense. I won't swear to that as
I haven't really walked down that fork of the initialization tree, but
it seems logical. From this point, log entries will appear to be
correct, although they may not be super accurate as hardware clocks are
often inaccurate, so the initial setting of the system clock may not
be accurate.
If all that's true, then doing "journalctl -b 0" will show a big
timeshift at some point--things before that point will be using the
(incorrect) localtime-based system clock, things after it will be using
the UTC-based system clock. journalctl has no idea when the clock got
buggered and assumes all entries are UTC-based, hence the apparent time
shift.
A second, smaller time jump will appear once chronyd actually syncs the
system clock to true UTC (indicated by that "stepped by" bit in the
logs). Once that happens, then log entries will be accurate from that
point onwards and chronyd will do its best to keep the system clock
synced to UTC. Keep in mind that journalctl will assume ALL log entries
have a UTC timestamp, regardless of when the clocks got mangled and this
is the cause of the time shifts in the display. The radical change in
system clock when it switches from local time to UTC time MAY cause
programs to malfunction, since they assume that the system clock was in
UTC. This _may_ be why your VPN was disconnecting...it assumed there was
no traffic for whatever the difference is between your local time and
UTC, so it disconnects.
I can understand the time sync causing a problem with the VPN, but the
question I have is why now? Its probably 12 months since the last time I
ran the VPN, so it would have been in F27 and earlier where the VPN was
actively being used and there were no issues with the bios clock being
set to local time, which is how I've been running the bios time settings
for over 30 years, except for once when I did try it set to GMT and
Windows couldn't handle it, but also having said that I haven't been
running Linux for that long, I've only been running it at home for 10 or
so years and I have always at least dual booted.
Could my issue be that this time shift issue has always been present but
its only now that it is becoming obvious?
regards,
Steve
Note that the hardware clock will remain in local time so all this stuff
has to happen again whenever you boot Linux unless you do something like
"hwclock -w" to set the hardware clock to the (now UTC) system clock.
Windows won't like that. :-)
Always remember that the timezone stuff is only used for user
interaction (displaying things, setting things, interpreting crontabs,
etc.). All internal timestamps (log entries, even the atime, ctime and
mtime values on files) are based on the system clock, which is expected
to be in UTC (for Linux).
If your primary OS is Windows, then by all means keep the hardware clock
in local time. Just be aware that Linux logs (and some programs) may
be confused until the system clock becomes UTC-based and synced to UTC
during startup when you boot Linux. Then everything should be stable.
Time: It's all relative.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital ricks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx -
- AIM/Skype: therps2 ICQ: 226437340 Yahoo: origrps2 -
- -
- Death is nature's way of dropping carrier -
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