[bitfolk] clocksource/0: Time went backwards

Hi, Short story: I would recommend that everyone using Debian Lenny, Ubuntu Hardy or later follow the instructions in: http://wiki.debian.org/Xen#head-2994c37779fecc0d4d17a00bbdbd7e018b598874 Longer story: Ever since kahlua was rebooted last week, causing all the VPSes on it to be suspended and restored, some customers found that their clocks got stuck on March 4th. This sort of message was found repeated many times in their logs: Mar 4 18:51:07 host kernel: [4491822.326661] clocksource/0: Time went backwards: ret=1c336e30802c7 delta=-3996610936036461 shadow=1c336ba8c7f37 o ffset=287bcb9e It became impossible for them to set the time, cron wouldn't work, and various other brokenness. This seemed to only affect Debian Lenny and Ubuntu Hardy VPSes, although not all of them -- I have several Lenny VPSes on that machine for administrative purposes and they were all fine. I'm guessing it depended on exactly what the VPS was doing at the time of the suspend/restore. It was not possible for those affected to do a shutdown, and so they ended up having to do a "destroy" then "boot" from the Xen shell. As a few people had reported this I had been searching for a fix and did find: http://wiki.debian.org/Xen#head-2994c37779fecc0d4d17a00bbdbd7e018b598874 but I was hoping to be able to replicate the problem on one of Bitfolk's own internal or testing VPSes. Today a helpful customer dropped by the IRC channel while he was experiencing this problem on his Debian Lenny VPS, and the above workaround fixed it for him. Later on this evening another customer with the same issue was also helped by the above. So, if you're running Debian Lenny or Ubuntu Hardy (or newer versions of either of these) I would recommend that you follow the instructions in the above link. I'll be using that configuration by default for new Lenny/Hardy VPSes until this is sorted out upstream. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting Encrypted mail welcome - keyid 0x604DE5DB