Topic: Is my Chumby Classic sick?

For the last few months, my Chumby Classic (black, first gen beanbag design) has been unable to keep accurate time. I have searched the threads and found reference to some issues in the past with timekeeping accuracy, but they don't seem relevant now that the service has been restarted. Let me explain what is happening...

I started to notice that the time would lag behind each morning. It could be as little as just a few minutes, and as much as 30 minutes or more. I checked to see if the time and date was set to automatically set (which it was), and was able to get things synced back up with a reboot. After a reboot, usually within an hour or two, you could see that Chumby's clock had already fallen behind by a minute or two (sometimes more). I tried changing to manually set date and time for a week, to see if that made a difference, but it did not. I still lose an appreciable number of minutes each day.

The strangest thing is the every once in a while, after a reboot, Chumby would keep accurate time for a few days. I would think that all was fixed, assuming that something finally synced up correctly, and then the slow clock would return within a day or two. The other last bit of strange behavior is that every once in a while and seemingly randomly, it appears that Chumby will sync up with the correct time on its own, without a reboot. For example, I'll notice that the time is off by 10 or more minutes in the evening and make a note to reboot in the morning. Then in the morning the time is correct, or maybe only a minute or two off.

So...any thoughts or (hopefully) a solution to my dilemma?

Sorry for the long post, but I figured more detail was better.

Thanks in advance.

Re: Is my Chumby Classic sick?

I'm not sure exactly what NTP server(s) the Chumby OS tries to sync against, but this behavior could be consistent with it picking an NTP server that isn't always available. When the server doesn't want to talk to you the local OS clock runs slow, but occasionally you're lucky and it comes back for a while, or after a reboot the Chumby goes looking for a good server and finds one that works for a while.

I can't really suggest how to fix it, but this might help others who could.

Re: Is my Chumby Classic sick?

Is your classic running the latest firmware? 

http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=8654

Cleaning up any loose bits and bytes.

Re: Is my Chumby Classic sick?

Looks like I am on FW version 1.7.2 so I will update it tomorrow and see if that fixes the problem.

Thanks for the quick replies.

Re: Is my Chumby Classic sick?

Yes, I've been noticing that pool.ntp.org is occasionally assigning questionable time servers - it seems it's been happening more frequently.  One symptom is that at boot, you sometimes get the time setting screens even though you have the Internet time setting enabled.  I'm also seeing some apparently giving bad time.

We might look into hosting a time server ourselves if this continues.

Re: Is my Chumby Classic sick?

Duane wrote:

One symptom is that at boot, you sometimes get the time setting screens even though you have the Internet time setting enabled.

I just got that yesterday on my C1. I thought it was odd.