It was very noticeable. I upgraded the entire cluster (14 machines) in
HH1202 one afternoon; half the machines started gaining time like mad, the
other half lost time like mad. All machines identical, indeed from the same
manufacturing batch as far as I can tell (and all idle, the spring semester
having just ended at the time). Within 15 minutes all of them were outside
of the time window the AFS kaservers were willing to grant them (the usual 5
minutes for Kerberos) and linux-afs had lost the battle to resync their
clocks. (10 minutes later xntpd was a standard part of our Linux
install....)
Later in the summer I upgraded them all to RH5.1, with xntpd disabled
initially so I could see how they would behave. They proceeded to do much
the same thing, except that a few of them waited most of a week before
suddenly beginning to drift wildly.
Every (RH5-based) Linux system I've encountered, whether installed by me or
by someone else, has behaved similarly, although not always with such a
massive time slew (it varies widely and for no discernable reason, even on
the same machine).
I've only installed 5.2 on a handful of machines so far, but the time
slippages are still there so far.
-- brandon s. allbery [os/2][linux][solaris][japh] allbery@kf8nh.apk.net system administrator [WAY too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu carnegie mellon / electrical and computer engineering KF8NH Kiss my bits, Billy-boy.
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