Whenever the server is rebooted, I’ve noticed that the time goes a bit screwy and jumps forward an hour, having tried a few different settings I found that it wasn’t just this server but others were having the same problem.

Apparently on some Dell servers running Linux, the command ‘/sbin/hwclock –systohc’ (to write the current system time into the hardware clock) fails with the error: select() to /dev/rtc to wait for clock tick timed out The solution is to add –directisa to the command. /sbin/hwclock –systohc –directisa If you’re running Fedora Core and possibly RedHat, you can add this to a configuration file so that it works when shutting down or rebooting the server. Just add the line: CLOCKFLAGS="–directisa" at the bottom of /etc/sysconfig/clock (or edit the existing CLOCKFLAGS line if there is one).