Error when applying Server clock drift (powershell)

Is that machine configured to use a 24 hour clock (military time)?

No

Is the error you're receiving persistent for these nodes or does this only occur occasionally?

I can they keep going from green to unknown on several servers.

Is there any common thread between these hosts that are exhibiting the problem? Are they all running the the same operating system version for instance?

We've done some investigation internally and believe the issue is that the default configured NTP server defined in the template is blocking your connection intermittently. If you have many servers configured with this template than it's possible you are exceeding their maximum rate of querying once every 4 seconds on occasion.

All users should ensure that their software NEVER queries a server more frequently than once every 4 seconds. Systems that exceed this rate will be refused service. In extreme cases, systems that exceed this limit may be considered as attempting a denial-of-service attack.

To resolve this issue I recommend changing the time server configured for some nodes to use pool.ntp.org instead.

I tried using pool.ntp.org and recieved the attached error message.

Based on the message returned it appears that host is blocking connections. The good news is there's plenty of publicly accessible NTP servers. Below is a list of a few of them from http://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi

There is a bug in the Server Clock Drift (Powershell) - Clock Drift NTP component.  If you make the following changes it should work reliably, I think.

Starting around line 24...

=====

    If ($remoteToSolarSkew)

    {

        $Skew = $remoteToSolarSkew.TotalSeconds - $ntpToSolarSkew;

        $stat=[math]::round($Skew,2);

        #$symb=$Skew.ToString().Substring(0,1);

        $symb=$stat.ToString().Substring(0,1);

        if ($symb -eq "-")

        {

            #$stat=[math]::round($Skew,2);

            $tmp=$stat.ToString().Remove(0,1);

            Write-Host "Message: Clock drift: $stat.";

            Write-Host "Statistic: $tmp";

            exit 0;

        }

        else

        {

            $stat=[math]::round($Skew,2);

            #Write-Host "Message: Clock drift: $symb $stat s.";

            Write-Host "Message: Clock drift: $stat s.";

            Write-Host "Statistic: $stat";

            exit 0;

        }

    }

=====

aLTeReGo - not sure if you can validate whether this error exists in the version on thwack.  The version that ships with SAM 6.1.1 has the error it.  By way of explanation, the error is that calling ::round() on a number like -0.00121 will be rounded to 0.00 (notice the negative sign was dropped).  But the $symb is set prior to rounding, so the logic for removing the negative symbol is used on a string with no negative symbol, which then results in $stat printing an empty string instead of a 0.

Thank you dthvt for bringing this to our attention (and even suggesting a fix!). I've logged this internally under FB383456 and will investigate the issue. We will likely be updating the template posted in the Content Exchange accordingly.