[Beowulf] delayed savings time crashes

[Florent Calvayrac]

David Kewley wrote:

>David,
>
>The reboots were due to a City of Pasadena power glitch at 9:17 that 
>morning. :)  It was raining, and a 34kV city feeder line that runs between 
>the generating plant at the entrance of the 110 and a substation at Del Mar 
>& Los Robles faulted.  The responsible breaker took 13 cycles to break, 
>during which time the single-phase voltage seen at Caltech dropped to about 
>75V.
>induce massive 12Hz oscillations on the room's power lines.
>
>As for the time glitch, that is probably induced by the fact that Daylight 
>Savings Time changes only take place on the "system" clock, and in a 
>standard Red Hat system those changes only get synced to the hardware clock 
>upon a clean shutdown.  So if your machine crashes after a DST change, then 
>upon bootup syslogd gets its time from the hardware clock, which is wrong.  
>The system clock is only corrected later in the bootup sequence, when ntpd 
>starts.  The best solution is probably to set the hardware clock to UCT 
>rather than local time.  UCT doesn't undergo step changes like most 
>timezones in the U.S. do, so the compensation for DST happens dynamically 
>in software, rather than requiring a hardware clock change.
>
>
>  
>
Why don't you use a line conditioner ? It's much cheaper than a similar 
powered
UPS ($1000 for 10kW),  many UPS dont guarantee voltage and waveform excepted
during clean power cuts, anyway.
A line conditioner is very handy in time of brownouts like during August 
thunderstorms.
We have a Salicru one on our cluster  and have a much better MTBF on our 
compute nodes in comparison
with the ones of a computing  room nearby.

Besides, I was confronted with the same problem about daylight saving time.
Just added a

clock -w

after the NTP synchronization in cron.daily so that the time would be 
corrected automatically
on the hardware clock.  (which is automatic on Windows btw).