Aurora R16, will not sync wtih internet NTP

Question

Hi All. I've been through numerous tip web sites (including the Dell help screens) and tried several things, but my PC will not synch with the internet NTP servers. I just get various errors similar to "Time synchronization failed. Please check network connectivity and retry." or "An error occurred ... the timeout period expired." but I can ping time.windows.com, which indicates to me that it's not a simple connectivity issue.

I set the time manually and that will be fine until my PC's clock drifts, as all PC clocks do, so this isn't urgent, it's just disappointing that a brand new name-brand 2024 PC isn't able to synch with the internet time.

For reference, here is a list (as best I can recall) of the troubleshooting steps I've tried:

Clicked "sync now".
Verified that the time service was set to automatic.
Manual synch via control panel.
Restarted the time service.
Unregistered, re-registered, and restarted the time service.
Tried a different NTP server.
I can ping time.windows.com, and my PC correctly selects my time zone (which I just used as a troubleshooting step, I turned it back off afterwards), so it seems odd that something as simple as syncing with an NTP server is not working.
Tweaked the poll interval in the registry.
Turned off my Bitdefender firewall and tried to manually sync.

If you have other ideas for me to try, I'd appreciate hearing them. Thanks.

LANMAN_TA · Answer

Geeman,

Do you by chance have any other firewalls on your network? Pinging the time server uses ICMP packet to get the response back from the time server. That actually is different than the NTP service that runs on UDP port 123.

Ping will respond to let you know it can see the server, but if you have a firewall that is blocking UDP port 123, your attempts to sync the time (with an outside internet source) will fail. If that is the case, that would be strange as outbound NTP is common, but its a plausible reason why its happening.

geeman1082 · Answer

@LANMAN_TA​ Thanks for the reply.  I can't find anything like that, but I agree that it seems like a plausible cause.  I've been using my mesh network as a router (long backstory that I won't bore you with), and it doesn't have a ton of settings like a 'real' router would have, so I'm pondering getting a router and changing the mesh into APs to see if that fixes it, but it's hard to get excited about spending more money just so I don't have to adjust the clock once or twice a year.

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Aurora R16, will not sync wtih internet NTP

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