Cannot synch using NTP on Proliant DL380 because of BIOS clock drift

[Lee Lieu]

Hi experts,

We have a problem with 2 of of our DL380 G3 runnning windows 2000 server which were built around the same time and have an identical setup.

We are trying to synchronise the clock of the machines with a local NTP server using NTP but the NTP deamon just doesn't seem to be able to adjust the time to bring it into synch. We are able to query the local NTP server(using ntpq)so we don't belive it is a network/secuirty issue. I have also unsuccessfully tried various builds of NTPD for windows including the latest 4.2.0.

We suspect it is a problem with the BIOS clock on both the machines which are both drifting quite badly (losing about 5 to 10 seconds a day). Usually the ntp.drift file is created when NTP is started - but this doea not occur and if you manually create this file, it would read it but never alter the drift value.

Does anyone have any suggestion or may be know how to configure the BIOS clock so to manually set the clock frequency - the BIOS setup (pressing F10 at startup)doesn't appear to give you that option except to change the time.

Thanks in advance,

Lee