Comment 53 for bug 114505

>J Carrera, I do not know what you mean by "'write to hardware switch' to ntpdate".

Sorry, I am on long travel and don't have my linux machine. As I recall it is something involving "--hwclock" or something like that. It may even be a separate command rather than an ntpdate switch. Maybe "date --hwclock"?

At any rate it is a command that writes the system time into the hardware clock--thus updating the hwclock to the correct current time. This is useful because system time is set during initial boot to the hardware clock time. If the hardware clock is more than 1000 sec off, ntp will fail when it tries to start, and it does not recover until manual intervention.