Vista Time Sync Issue

Posted by JD 06/18/2009 at 07:55

I’ve been running Vista on a laptop since Sept. Generally, I don’t really use Vista for anything other than a platform to run virtual machines. What I need from Vista is

  1. a stable host platform
  2. Disk access and storage for VMs
  3. Network access and bandwidth for VMs
  4. Video access for VMs
  5. Accurate Time Service since VMs get time from the host OS. There’s no way to disconnect time from the host provider.

Good Time Needed

Vista has been doing a good job at most of these things, except as a time server.
I’ve run corporate time servers. Accurate time is critical for computers, networks, and, most importantly, security.

NTP is the Standard

NTP, Network Time Protocol, has been the standard to synchronize computers for years and years. It just works in my experience. All my home systems have used ntp since 1996 when I started leaving 1 on 24/7/365 as a server. All of these systems have used ntp perfectly, until now, this MS-Vista machine.

Vista Time Sync Problems

So, when you have an issue, you check google, right? Seems I"m not alone with Vista time sync issues. The default time sync settings in Vista sync weekly with time.microsoft.com. This should be enough to keep a PC clock accurate within 2 seconds easily. My Vista PC was losing 2 minutes a day.

At first, I thought it was a firewall, bad time server address, some internet security suite, you know, the normal issues. What I did:

  1. point to pool.ntp.org for time servers
  2. My Vista PC only has the built-in firewall and no antivirus since it never goes on the internet except to hit MS-Update.
  3. Time sync is a client request protocol, so opening an inbound port on a router isn’t necessary.
  4. Hacked the registry to shorten the update interval from 7 days to 24 hours. Anything less than 24 hours is considered abusive by public time servers.
  5. CMOS battery – I’ve run computers for years and years. Only twice in all that time did I need to replace a CMOS battery and that was on a 5 year old system and an IBM server. This machine is less than a year old and plugged in and running almost 24/7.

Still Broken

At this point, vista is losing 15.47 seconds a day. That’s a failure in my book. 1-2 seconds would be manageable. 30 seconds breaks things like file synchronization with other systems.

Last Attempts

My remaining fix attempts are

  1. to run a time server internally on another machine so I can update Vista every 15 minutes.
  2. change to a 3rd party time sync solution

Aug 2009 Update

Time synchronization has remained an issue in Vista hosted virtualbox. Even just a few seconds after a time sync in Vista, virtualbox VMs are 15 seconds behind the official time servers at time.gov.

The vista time appears to be accurate, so this is a virtualbox issue in passing time from the host into all the client systems.

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