Timekeeping in stable/9

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 02:11:51PM +0100, Martin Sugioarto wrote:
> Am Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:20:51 +0100
> schrieb "Ronald Klop" <ronald-freebsd8 at klop.yi.org>:
> > Do you run NTP on the guest XP also? If yes, turn it off.
> 
> Windows XP default installation (synch'ed to time.windows.com).
> Switching this off, does not have any influence. I think MS-Windows
> does not do continuous synchronization, only at system start, I guess.

Incorrect; Windows XP syncs the clock using the W32Time service, which
polls NTP at the interval specified in DWORD registry key
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpClient\SpecialPollInterval.

You can read more about it in detail here (see section "Windows XP
Professional and all versions of Windows Server 2003"):

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/884776

> > BTW: My experience with VBox is that it is nice for hobby stuff, but
> > not for heavy load server stuff. VMWare does a better job there.

Agreed.

The number of problems with VirtualBox continues to grow (you should see
my Mail/sent folder sometime).  I don't know or why anyone on earth
would use VirtualBox with problems like what's described in this thread,
combined with problems like what's described below (which TMK still
hasn't been addressed):

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2011-February/061642.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2011-July/063172.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2011-July/063221.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2011-July/063322.html

I would recommend you stick with bare metal, or use something that's at
least well-established like VMware products (Workstation, for example,
is actually affordable, and ESXi is free -- though there have been
problems posted to the list about FreeBSD on ESXi as well).  Xen gets
praise here on the lists, but I haven't tried it myself.  I stick with
bare metal for everything, sans "tinkering around".

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                     http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                 Mountain View, CA, US |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.             PGP 4BD6C0CB |