Mark Griffiths

There are command line options already to do that - just have a look on the web site. The NTP specification specifically prohibits clients from being configured to sync at fixed times so as to prevent excessive traffic at certain times of the day, so i would recommend against doing this, or at least use an odd time if you must.

It might be that I updated the installer to a newer version which doesn't support Windows 98, but I don't remember doing so. What happens if you try to install version 3.14?

OK, thanks for the suggestion. I'll probably change it to something like: User-Agent: NetTime/2.10 or something similar.

Hi Ken, Not retrying the server for 15 minutes after receiving a Kiss of Death from it is expected behavior. Under the NTP protocol standard, a Kiss of Death packet is a way for the server to tell clients to go away and use a different server if possible, so if the client has to retry, it should wait a while before doing so. You could perhaps set the NetTime service to run as a "Delayed start" to give the router a bit more time to start up. Let me know how you go with this suggestion.

OK, do you have another computer that is also running all of the time? If so, you could set that up with NetTime to act as a server and configure your laptop with this issue to sync to it.

Hi Marek, Thanks for that. I've taken a look at your log file and I've gone and taken a look at the NetTime source code as well: NetTime already actually works pretty much as you're suggesting: It stores the number of seconds until the next sync is due and decrements that counter every second until it reaches 0 and then does a regular sync then. From your log files, I'm guessing that you're right that there's something wrong with the real time clock in your laptop and the problem is coming about...

Hi Marek, That does seem rather odd. It sounds like the time has gone backwards, but NetTime should be detecting that and try to sync straight away. If the network is down at the time, it should detect when the network goes back up and then do a sync then. It might be worth emailing a full copy of your log file just so that I can get a better idea of what's actually going on. It might still be worth doing as you suggest, however it's also possible that something else is going on which is affecting...

You can effectively do this already by running the program with the /synconce command line parameter. Make sure that it is run with administrator privileges.