As some of you might have noticed, the clock is gradually drifting forward. In fact, it's approximately four minutes ahead of the actual time. I cannot simply resynchronize it now because it would cause posts to appear out of order if any are made close to the synchronization point, as the clock will move back four minutes to its proper place. For that reason, at 11 PM PST tonight (that's in roughly 5½ hours), I will be shutting down the site for about five minutes to fix the clock.

This applies to all of the Victory Road Network.

Out of curiosity, how did this end up happening?

On Debian/Ubuntu servers, by default there is no automatic clock synchronization, because if the clock syncs during an active transaction, particularly if during multiple transactions (in this case, a transaction is writing something to the database), it could cause a problem if the entries are out of order. It means very little on, say, a forum, but someone running a business could be liable for having database entries out of order.

Quartz clocks, like the ones in computers, are rather accurate, but they do lose or gain small amounts of time over long periods, so they need to be re-set every now and then. Windows, for instance, attempts to synchronize every week or two.

I had to do it a little later than desired, but it's so weird seeing the time go backward:

$ date
Tue Aug 12 00:29:52 PDT 2014
$ sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org
12 Aug 00:25:47 ntpdate[15731]: step time server 204.2.134.164 offset -249.769222 sec

$ sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org
12 Aug 00:31:12 ntpdate[16484]: adjust time server 204.2.134.164 offset 007809 sec