2004-10-01

How time flies

My local development server has twice in recent days lost track of the current time. The first time it happened, I only noticed because Maven complained with a bizarre error when I tried to run it. After Googling and digging and whatnot, I finally decided to reboot the machine. It wasn't until after that that I noticed that the system time had been off. I made sure that Webmin was set up to sync the clock from an NTP server, and filed it away in the "how often does that happen" category.

Well, it just happened again. Again, it was the bizarre error from Maven that tipped me off. This time, I had the sense to check the system time before rebooting, and sure enough, apparently I'd slid back to 1970 when I wasn't looking. I went into Webmin to force an NTP resync and noticed that the hardware clock was still correct; only the system clock was wrong. Webmin has the ability to set the system clock from the hardware clock, which I did, and was promptly booted out of Webmin because:

Session timed out after 54069110 minutes of inactivity.

102 years, 10 months, 13 days, 15 hours, and 15 minutes passed when I wasn't paying attention? No wonder I'm feeling old. :-)

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