Clock problems after restarting, on Troller Zee S2

[DaveB]

Had a problem when I first set up my system a month-ish ago, where events weren't triggering. Finally realized that the clock wasn't right anymore in HS, rebooted and everything was good for a month.

This morning we had a power outage in the neighborhood, and power was out for about 3 hrs. Power came back on, and I had 'assumed' that everything started okay since I could get into HS via web browser. Tonight I'm wondering why my sunset lights didn't come on, then quickly determined that the HS system clock was off by 3 hrs (the event never triggered, because the HS time was incorrect. I rebooted the system, and time is corrected, and back to working okay.

So I obviously have a weak link with this Troller Linux system somewhere. Perhaps my expectations are too high. I would expect that the system would have restarted, and whatever it is in the Pi and Linux and HS that is responsible for maintaining the clock, and/or resetting it during startup would work. I wouldn't have expected that I have to take a manual effort to restart the system to correct the clock.

Do I have a hardware issue that Pi isn't keeping the clock running internally?? Is there something in Linux that is supposed to periodically sync the time by itself? Do I have to create an event or something which triggers every x hours to somehow resync the clock? I don't know how this all is supposed to work, so I can't determine where the process is broken.

How is this supposed to work, and what is a permanent automatic fix for this problem? Thanks in advance for your ideas...

[Rupp]

The HS Zee S2 pulls the time from the internet. I wonder if your Zee restarted faster than your internet coming back online? A restart of the Zee should solve this.

[DaveB]

I guess it's possible that the Pi booted up, before the uverse modem/router. So there is no hardware clock when power goes out? And the way it gets set is during initial bootup......it does a time sync? Is there a way for an event, to force a time sync?

I searched the forums but didn't see anything, I wouldn't suspect that I'd be the only person that would have run into this with a Linux Troller.

Trying to figure out what the permanent change would be, to prevent time problems in the future.

[DaveB]

I found this in searching the forums, regarding HSSentry.....

I'm not sure it will do anything in my case, in that my system had internet connectivity all day after the power came back up. I had accessed HS thru my windows browser (the find homeseer process). The system was up, just had the wrong time because of the power outage.




"This is how it works. HSSentry attempts to communicate with HomeSeer every 20 seconds. If it gets 7 failures it will reboot the server. These settings are adjustable:

INI setting under Settings: SentryCheckInterval, default value is 20 (seconds)
INI setting also under Settings: SentryErrorCount, default value is 7

You can also look at HS_Sentry.log for information on when the system was rebooted.

If you are seeing issues it indicates to me that something is taxing your CPU so hard that it's blocking HS web server access for a good bit of time. (140 seconds by default)."



That came from this : https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/le...ssentry-config

[zwolfpack]

Network Time Protocol (NTP) synchronization is handled by the Linux OS; however exactly how is dependent on which OS version you are running. To check whether or not the time is being synchronized with NTP servers, run the following:

timedatectl status

Under the most recent Raspbian "stretch" build this returns

      Local time: Wed 2018-12-19 22:33:02 PST
  Universal time: Thu 2018-12-20 06:33:02 UTC
        RTC time: n/a
       Time zone: US/Pacific-New (PST, -0800)
 Network time on: yes
NTP synchronized: [B]yes[/B]
 RTC in local TZ: no

Under the older "jessie",

      Local time: Wed 2018-12-19 23:09:33 PST
  Universal time: Thu 2018-12-20 07:09:33 UTC
        RTC time: n/a
       Time zone: America/Los_Angeles (PST, -0800)
     NTP enabled: no
NTP synchronized: [B]no[/B]
 RTC in local TZ: no
      DST active: no
 Last DST change: DST ended at
                  Sun 2018-11-04 01:59:59 PDT
                  Sun 2018-11-04 01:00:00 PST
 Next DST change: DST begins (the clock jumps one hour forward) at
                  Sun 2019-03-10 01:59:59 PST
                  Sun 2019-03-10 03:00:00 PDT

If "NTP synchronized" indicates no, you can turn it on via:

sudo timedatectl set-ntp true

After this, timedatectl status returns

      Local time: Wed 2018-12-19 23:10:07 PST
  Universal time: Thu 2018-12-20 07:10:07 UTC
        RTC time: n/a
       Time zone: America/Los_Angeles (PST, -0800)
     NTP enabled: yes
NTP synchronized: [B]yes[/B]
 RTC in local TZ: no
      DST active: no
 Last DST change: DST ended at
                  Sun 2018-11-04 01:59:59 PDT
                  Sun 2018-11-04 01:00:00 PST
 Next DST change: DST begins (the clock jumps one hour forward) at
                  Sun 2019-03-10 01:59:59 PST
                  Sun 2019-03-10 03:00:00 PDT

[DaveB]

NTP not being enabled on the Troller load, appears like it may be the root cause of my problem. First screen capture is my original settings, 2nd screen is after enabling per your instructions.. Thanks SOOO much!

Have to figure out when I can schedule an outage now, to test the fix.