Monday, February 8, 2010

Windows 2008 NTP problem?

I've got a Windows 2008 R2 server sitting as a guest on our RHEL 5.4 server.  I just happened to notice that the time was off.  Way off, like about six minutes.

The w32tm.exe utility has some interesting switches.  I used one to stripchart against the main time server:

C:\Users\Administrator>w32tm /stripchart /computer:buran
Tracking buran [192.168.1.200:123].
The current time is 2/8/2010 12:12:44 PM
12:12:44 d:+00.0077832s o:+416.5745527s
12:12:46 d:+00.0029019s o:+417.0718254s
12:12:48 d:+00.0019183s o:+417.5564322s
12:12:51 d:+00.0019141s o:+418.0448887s
12:12:53 d:+00.0019232s o:+418.5206214s
12:12:55 d:+00.0019154s o:+419.0251265s
12:12:57 d:+00.0019209s o:+419.5642993s
12:12:59 d:+00.0019262s o:+420.0780252s
12:13:01 d:+00.0019133s o:+420.5655424s
12:13:03 d:+00.0019161s o:+421.0448077s
12:13:05 d:+00.0028745s o:+421.5292839s
12:13:07 d:+00.0019101s o:+422.0110611s

Wow.  I'm losing a second every four seconds.  Not good.

I've got w32time set up in NTP mode on the Windows server, so I'm not quite sure what's going on here.  Until I figure it out, I'm going to set the system up to resync time once a minute.  That'll at least keep me within 15 seconds of reality.  Change

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Config\TimProviders\NTPClient\SpecialPollIntercval

to 60, and start/stop w32time

C:\Users\Administrator>w32tm /stripchart /computer:buran
Tracking buran [192.168.1.200:123].
The current time is 2/8/2010 12:26:40
12:26:40 d:+00.0048590s o:+09.2796603s
12:26:42 d:+00.0009300s o:+09.8433852s
12:26:44 d:+00.0019293s o:+10.4054516s
12:26:46 d:+00.0019263s o:+10.9600696s
12:26:48 d:+00.0019241s o:+11.4967021s
12:26:50 d:+00.0019256s o:+12.0280363s
12:26:52 d:+00.0019269s o:+12.5750087s
12:26:54 d:+00.0019231s o:+13.1260536s
12:26:56 d:+00.0019243s o:+13.6663052s
12:26:58 d:+00.0018872s o:+14.2191757s
12:27:15 d:+00.0009443s o:+00.1400540s
12:27:17 d:+00.0019228s o:+00.6581759s

Better.  Not perfect, but better, and the network will be able to handle an NTP request every minute.  Now, all I have to do is find out what's wrong...

1 comment:

  1. Not sure if this is similar, but I know VMware has a PDF about time keeping for guests, here...

    http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf

    The doc has some good troubleshooting stuff in it, in addition it points out how it's not unusual for the VMs to be behind "real" time because of missed ticks (especially if Windows).

    Hope this helps.

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