I posted this as a reply under another article called loosing time but I figured I might get more help if I started my own discussion. I have recently taken over the admin of three different Novell servers running 4.1, 5 and 5.1 at three different locations. They are stand alone servers and don't have connections to the Internet so I don't know what it would take to reference them with an outside atomic server. I am not attempting to 'bash' Novell but doesn't it seem silly that a Netware server can't keep time as well as a $ 5 watch? I know that NT has it's bugs but they are at least complicated things, not things that a watch from a gumball machine could do. I am quite frustrated. One of the servers is a fairly new (less than a year) 5.1 server that has never been able to keep time. It loses days of time over the course of a month. Another server, the Netware 5 one, just recently started losing time at the rate of a few minutes a day. The 4.1 server had a hard drive go out and when I replaced it the time went back 3 years! I tried to set the time through the bios, DOS, and the console and just to upset me it went back another ten years! Right now the clock says 1988 and I cannot set it forward. Strange, huh? On that one there is no timesync.cfg file on the server, should I write one myself? The Novell knowledgebase is less than helpful to someone who doesn't already know what they are doing. This morning I downloaded the service packs for netware 4, 5, and 5.1. I also downloaded the server.exe update that fixes some kind of driver problem that causes a netware server to lose time. I am armed with a burned cd full of patches and text files and I am going out to wage war against time loss. Any suggestions? Any tips?

I have only seen significant lost time when using hosts with IDE drives/IDE devices. On host machines that only use SCSI devices, the time drift was acceptible.