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I have a system where this is the output of last reboot -F

reboot   system boot  3.10.0-1127.13.1 Tue Aug 18 14:14:16 2020 - Wed Aug 19 07:14:44 2020  (17:00)
reboot   system boot  3.10.0-1127.10.1 Tue Jul 21 14:18:26 2020 - Tue Aug 18 18:14:05 2020 (28+03:55)
reboot   system boot  3.10.0-1127.10.1 Tue Jul 21 14:10:48 2020 - Tue Aug 18 18:14:05 2020 (28+04:03)
reboot   system boot  3.10.0-1127.8.2. Tue Jun 23 14:33:11 2020 - Tue Jul 21 18:10:37 2020 (28+03:37)
reboot   system boot  3.10.0-1127.el7. Tue May 19 16:16:47 2020 - Tue Jun 23 18:32:59 2020 (35+02:16)

This system is patched on the third Tuesday of every month around 6:00 PM, and the endpoint management tool automatically reboots the system (reboot command is not issued interactively) when patching is complete. This is consistent with what I'm seeing in the last column. However, the startup times don't match this.

Take for instance the top 2 entries. It's saying that the system was taken down Aug 18 at 6:14 but the top line indicates that it last came up 4 hours before that at 2:14 and has been up until now (Aug 19 at 7:14). This makes no sense to me. The only thing I can think is that the system time isn't set properly when recording the boot time to wtmp.

Can someone help me decipher?

NevDull
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  • Maybe a discrepancy of the hardware-clock and the running clock? is this a VM? – stoney Aug 19 '20 at 12:07
  • That's where my mind was headed too. Yeah it's a VM running on an ESXi host. Maybe vmware tools needs to synchronize the clock? – NevDull Aug 19 '20 at 12:10
  • If you are on UTC-4 timezone this might well be the case (windows uses localtime on hwclock, so 18:xx. subtract 4 hours and there you are) – stoney Aug 19 '20 at 12:24
  • You should put the output of timedatectl (or the contents of /etc/adjtime) into the question. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/600490/5132 – JdeBP Aug 19 '20 at 18:52
  • @stoney it looks like RTC is set to local time here as well
    Local time: Thu 2020-08-20 10:12:41 EDT Universal time: Thu 2020-08-20 14:12:41 UTC RTC time: Thu 2020-08-20 10:12:41     – NevDull Aug 20 '20 at 14:17

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