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SM 8495: alarm "Your system clock is more than 15 seconds off" even if my server is in perfect sync
Problem reported by Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS - 4/5/2023 at 1:49 PM
Submitted
First issue with the new version: we continuosly get alarm "Your system clock is more than 15 seconds off":



BUT the server is in perfect sync with POOL.NTP.ORG, as you can see here:



It seems that SmarterMail consider UTC time, but we are in Italy... so we are in CET (Cnetral EEuropean Time - UTC+1) in autumn/winter, and NOW we are in CEST (Central European Summer Time - UTC+2), the light saving time that we use in spring/summer.



Is there perhaps a setting somewhere to tell SmarterMail what timezone to consider?


Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins at SERSIS
Currently manages 3 SmarterMail installations (1 in cloud for SERSIS which provides service to a few hundreds 3rd party Mail Domains + 2 on premise to customers)

20 Replies

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Kyle Kerst Replied
Employee Post
Hi Gabriele! The server should use the OS time and timezone settings, so you should not need to set anything manually. I'm going to do some testing on this scenario and I'll let you know what I find out.
Kyle Kerst
Technical Support Specialist
SmarterTools Inc.
(877) 357-6278
www.smartertools.com
0
Kyle Kerst Replied
Employee Post
I ran through this under our last dev build and the current release build (to match your testing) but was not able to replicate in the what I believe is the same configuration. Below you'll see the results of the powershell command Get-TimeZone, and the NTP query you ran as well:
The offset on the NTP results looks to be about the same as well, but I don't see this chronic warning you are getting. On that note, I believe Windows uses just the one timezone for CET now and just offsets for daylight savings time. Can you check the Get-TimeZone command results and post here too? Per this list below you are in the W. Europe Standard Time default timezone in Windows:


I had no issues testing under that timezone either. Perhaps we have a locale issue in Windows as well - I can test that next.
Kyle Kerst
Technical Support Specialist
SmarterTools Inc.
(877) 357-6278
www.smartertools.com
0
Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS Replied
This is the result in my server:



Per Microsoft indication, we are in W. Europe Standard Time , maybe not exactly the strictly same of CET:

Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins at SERSIS
Currently manages 3 SmarterMail installations (1 in cloud for SERSIS which provides service to a few hundreds 3rd party Mail Domains + 2 on premise to customers)
0
Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS Replied
Strange: the alarm has now stopped appearing...

I don't know...

I'll let you know if it happens again...
Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins at SERSIS
Currently manages 3 SmarterMail installations (1 in cloud for SERSIS which provides service to a few hundreds 3rd party Mail Domains + 2 on premise to customers)
0
Kyle Kerst Replied
Employee Post
Interesting, I wonder if the NTP results were temporarily askew and resolved themselves at some point. Do you see any NTP related errors or warnings in the Event Viewer in Windows?
Kyle Kerst
Technical Support Specialist
SmarterTools Inc.
(877) 357-6278
www.smartertools.com
1
Brian Bjerring-Jensen Replied
Currently seeing the same thing right after we log in.... Build 8504.

It started appearing today.

0
Kyle Kerst Replied
Employee Post
I recommend checking your system time against a valid NTP server from Microsoft, as well as your timezone and other settings. We were not able to reproduce this issue here, and have had no tickets submitted on this.
Kyle Kerst
Technical Support Specialist
SmarterTools Inc.
(877) 357-6278
www.smartertools.com
0
Vahn Babigian Replied
Kyle, remember when you where working on another ticket for me you brought the 15 second notification to my attention. After re-syncing with the timeserver I still got the message. I had to reboot the server to make it go away. The question to ask is why we never got this message prior to the upgrade to build 8495. 

 
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Brian Bjerring-Jensen Replied
I am getting this constantly now. Its syncing towards 0.dk.pool.ntp.org and no issues there.

This is frustrating... to say the least.
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Brian Bjerring-Jensen Replied
this could be related to the MAPI issues since when I sync the time and restart outlook, then messages are not stuck in outbox.
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Brian Bjerring-Jensen Replied
I created a task in task scheduler to run every minute syncing the clock on the server.

cmd.exe w32tm /resync /rediscover

And it hasnt given an error message since.
2
echoDreamz Replied
We stopped using the Windows time service a while back, always had issues with it and servers being out 20-30 seconds. Switched to using the Meinberg NTP client with one of their LANTIME rackmount servers and all servers have been extremely accurate for ~10 years.
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Brian Bjerring-Jensen Replied
8504 is throwing the error despite clocks in perfect sync.(at least here).
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Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS Replied
It hasn't happened to me since the first initial alarms...

It stopped after I synced the server to POOL.NTP.ORG and then restarted the server
Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins at SERSIS
Currently manages 3 SmarterMail installations (1 in cloud for SERSIS which provides service to a few hundreds 3rd party Mail Domains + 2 on premise to customers)
0
Ron Raley Replied
Does this issue present itself in the latest build 8510?
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Brian Bjerring-Jensen Replied
Havent had any alarms yet. But running background sync via task scheduler every minute....to avoid it.
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Ron Raley Replied
Brian, do you mind disabling your workaround to verify fix?
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Brian Bjerring-Jensen Replied
Yup. I'll report back
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Brian Bjerring-Jensen Replied
HAvent seen it since upgrade to 8510. I will keep an eye out for it though since I believe some of the MAPI functionality is relying on a stable NTP function.
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Brian Bjerring-Jensen Replied
8531 just updated getting the error again.



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