Server Clock problem

[hughes]

I'm having a problem where a SBS 2000 server is gradually losing time at about 3 hours per day. I thought it might be the BIOS and/or motherboard battery. So I installed a new battery and flashed the BIOS. But the problem is still there. I've tried searching the web but cannot find anything simmilar to the current problem.

Any help or ideas are much appreciated.

Regards

Mike

[victor]

In the run up to Y2K there was a predication (much ridiculed at the time) that Intel microprocessors would start to run slower with 2000+ year dates.

Maybe we should have listened to them.

One quick hack: write a script to automatically reset the date/time from a time server every hour or so:
[tf.nist.gov...]

It won't fix the underlying problem, but it will give you close to the right time most of the time.

[mole]

or synchronise it to Microsoft's time server ...
open a command prompt, then
net time /setsntp:time.windows.com

that will keep it showing the correct time

[BertieB]

I agree with what mole said - create a btach script with that to run that, say each each hour (as above). The only thing I would point out is that if you didn't want to use Microsoft's time server (for whatever reason), there exists a pool of NTP servers that you can use by substituting pool.ntp.org instead of time.windows.com.

The pool.ntp.org project is a big virtual cluster of timeservers striving to provide reliable easy to use NTP service for millions of clients without putting a strain on the big popular timeservers.

So the command would be:

net time /setsntp:pool.ntp.org

Either (or even another server such as time.nist.gov) will do.

[mole]

you don't have to keep running the 'net time' command - having once set the name of the time server, windows will sort out the synchronisation itself, and keep you in sync with real-world time (assuming the windows time service is running on your machine, of course).

[hughes]

Thanks for the suggestions. I was thinking of using the sntp service, but I thought it only updates every 7 hours after a finite number of successful synchronisations. Ideally I'd like it to update every hour using the pool.ntp.org method as suggested by BertieB. I'll have to look into this a bit more.

Cheers

Mike

[pageoneresults]

Just did a search on this in Google and there are other comments out there about this. Some of them refer to a problem with Dell computers, XP and SBS 2000 where a registry fix is in order.