Date reset

[okasion]

Hello guys,
The last weekend we had a very weird problem with some FBSD servers that for no reason did reset their date:

Three FreeBSD 5.5-STABLE servers and one FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE running each one Apache servers with MySQL, PHP, and Postfix as MTA, did reset their date exactly to 1993, 28 February (?). We corrected this with the date() command, but we have no idea about what happened, we haven't seen any security breach, and verified that our crontabs nor any script was not the culprit.
What we DO have in the crontab of all this four servers is the following command:

0 * * * * root ntpdate tick.nap.com.ar 1>&2>&/dev/null

So, please, could someone enlighten us?
Thanks in advance.

 

[Beastie]

A problem with the NTP server? Or maybe a bug somewhere in those old systems? You should consider doing an update sometime.
By the way, according to the manual page, ntpdate(8) has been deprecated. You can use ntpd -gq instead.

 

[gordon@]

I would also recommend using multiple ntp servers instead of just a single source. ntp is designed to rule out skewed time sources if it can establish a quorum. It would help guard against this problem.