w32tm.exe not correcting time

[Moe]

Hello. I am running several Win2000 servers that are
stand alone (no AD) and I am trying to sync the clock with
an external NTP server. I don't want to run W32time as a
service; rather set the time using w32tm.exe utility
(executed once a day via the AT scheduler).

Here is the problem. If my clock is off by about 3
minutes, and I run "w32tm -once", it shows the time is off
but it DOES NOT correct the time. The eventviewer log
shows "Time service corrected the clock error by 173
seconds" or another number of seconds but the clock stays
the same. If I run it serveral times, I get several of
these entries in the log without any changes to the
clock. If the clock if off by 4 minutes or more, then it
seems to work just fine.

Well, a clock off my 3 minutes is not acceptable for a
time critical app I'm running. Any suggestions? I know I
can install free NTP clients but I would rather use
something that already comes with Windows.

TIA,

-Moe

 

[Bob I]

What happens if you use the -s switch to force it to sync?

 

[moe]

If the "Windows Time" service is running, I get:

RPC to local server returned 0x0

If the time service is not running, I get:

RPC to local server returned 0x6b5

So, it seems like W32tm with a -s tries to contact a
windows time server (local machine in this case), and
ignores the SNTP settings.

Doing a "net time /querysntp" returns:

The current SNTP value is: ntp1.<myschool>.edu
ntp2.<myschool>.edu
The command completed successfully.

Any other thoughts? Thanks.

-Moe