Great Western Coffee Shop

I see the forum's clock has edged 5 minutes ahead of the rest of the world - can't wait for next weekend, I guess.

Is that what is making the "recent posts" selector misbehave?

Nah, it's another side effect of that eclipse or at the supermoon or the solar ener
gy flares being fired at us from the sun. So many bytes of astronomical/ astrological/ archaeological/anthropological data at the moment my head is spinning!

Why? Is there something special about next weekend?

Fixed.   

Sorry about that - server problem earlier today; this is a side effect I have seen before, and I only had minimal time to check as I was sitting in a conference and concentrating on those other matters.

British Summertime! Time to take off your thick Winter coats and put on your thick Summer coats instead.

There have been a couple of server funnies recently (you may have noticed the server down for short periods). It's a real "odd one" as each time the server comes back, the clock has jumped forward 5 minutes or so.   Firstly - if anyone else has seen this behaviour on a system and can educate me as to what's happened, I would be grateful.   Secondly, if it happens again at a time when I'm not rushed off my feet and the site wasn't megabusy, we may do something rather more than just restart - so we could be offline for a few hours. Just sayin' ...

The clock jumping forwards on a reboot problem tripped my "that's curious" switch, so I had a quick google.  I wonder if it might be the /etc/adjtime file?  See https://eloquence.marxmeier.com/sdb/html/954237377.html for more details.

I noticed some down time yesterday afternoon and note that this morning the forum clock is running 6 minutes fast.

The two are unrelated.  The clock is just me being scruffy on not setting properly on a reboot ( I think I have the clues to automate this and a handful of other tasks when I start up in the future).

The server wasn't actually down - just rather busy as we were under a denial of service attack.  With (?) over 500 requests being made for pages in parallel, there was little or no opportunity for others to get in and that made it appear that the server was down.   Which - in effect - it was until it was flagged up as struggling by its heartbeat sister.