Time issue on OpenVMS 7.3-2

[Jorge Cocomess]

Hi,

This question probably been asked a thousand times, but I am still confused about time drifting. Being that I am new to OpenVMS, I am going to ask anyway.

My VMS server is gaining about 2-4 minutes per week. I can manually set the time on the server (set time=), but I hate to have to do this every week or so.

Is there some where I can look and see if some configuration needs to be set or some protocol is not set correctly??

Any suggestions or ideas would greatly be appreciate it.

Thank you in advance.

Jorge

[Richard Whalen]

The clock in the system box has less accuracy than the watch on your wrist. While yours appears to be fast, others will appear to be slow, especially if the system spends a lot of time at high IPL. If you are running a TCP/IP stack (TCP/IP services, MultiNet or TCPware), then I suggest that you look into enabling NTP and synchronizing your system to some system that has an external time reference. You can look at www.ntp.org for more information on NTP and where to find a time reference.

[John Gillings]

Jorge,

Your computer is NOT a chronometer.

Believe it or no, the standard for accuracy of the software clock on an OpenVMS system is .025%, which permits drift of up to about 20 seconds per day.

2 minutes over a week is within spec (just), but 4 is not. That said it's very unusual to find a system running that far out, so it might be worth logging a case with HP to see if there's anything weird going on on your system

The hardware clock is more accurate .01% so you may improve things by resetting the software clock to the hardware clock. Just issue:

$ SET TIME

(don't specify a value). Executing that every so often may help keep better time.

If you want/need accurate time on any computer system you should turn on some kind of time synchronization mechanism, such as NTP.