Losing time...

My ISPConfig virtual appliance seems to be loosing time every day. I reset the time yesterday around 10PM and it has already lost approximately 6 hours. I've tried NTP as well as just hard setting the date/time and neither seems to work. Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?

Thanks!
Troy

 

I have never installed the vmware tools on a linux box. Can you point me in the right direction on this?

No, when I run ntpdate pool.ntp.org, I get the following message: the NTP socket is in use, exiting

Any ideas?

 

This means that ntpdate is already running.

Oliver is currently writing a tutorial about installing VMware Tools on various distributions. It will be published in a few days, I think.

 

I believe it's a specific problem when VMWare is running on a Linux host with an AMD processor; it's an issue with the timing calibration being messed up by powernowd. Certainly, for instance, there's no such issue with a VM running in VMWare Fusion on a mac host.

Installing VMWare Tools is the solution; and once you've installed it you need to run the vmware-toolbox in order to actually turn on RTC synchronisation. The VMWare Toolbox is an X application, so you'll need to supply its minimal X11 dependencies so you can run it through a tunnelled X. (xauth, libXi, libX11)

I've had little luck using ntp to keep the clock right; an ntpdate command in a cronjob running every *minute* made it not too bad (but you do need ntpd to be disabled or you get the error you've been getting, I think).

Installing VMWare Tools can be a bit distro-specific. It's even so eccentric on Gentoo that I included an off-topic mini-howto on doing it on Gentoo in my Perfect Setup howto for that distro. Others, for instance, Ubuntu, are far more straightforward, being supported by VMWare directly.

(Of course I note the original poster didn't specify it was a *VMWare* virtual machine... :-}