NtpClient will wait 3473457 minutes (over 6 years!) before it will do a new attempt of DNS resolution, eventid 134
I know it's an old question but my own research came across this post on technet.
It says that the reason for the long delay is due to an output bug in the event viewer. Event viewer is misinterpreting the raw data of the string value "15" in the registry as a number.
You could find the value of registry NtpClient\ResolvePeerBackoffMinutes is 15, the output in the event log is 3473457 = 0x00350031, which is little-endian format of the Unicode string "15".
- Alex Zhaozx - MSFT CSG
Just adding some more info in case someone else comes across this in a search. There are a few disturbing things about this Event Viewer message:
- The fact that your client could not do an NTP sync.
- The fact that the DNS resolution error was on '', not an actual host name.
- The fact that the retry interval is crazy long.
I get the exact same message on several of my workstations as well (Windows 7, joined to a 2003-level Domain).
Regarding items 1-2, what I noticed is those messages only show up as the workstation is falling asleep. They show up 1 second after the Kernel-Power message indicating the computer is falling asleep due to system idle. At the same time, a bunch of network services are pausing as well. My theory is that the time service is just figuring out that the network has gone away. DNS is probably stopped at that point, hence the '' name.
Prior to that I see Event Viewer messages from Time-Service about ~15min before, indicating that it synced successfully. So, it is unlikely to be a configuration issue.
Look at the context of the messages in Event Viewer. If you are seeing this message as the computer falls alseep or shuts down, no biggie. If you are seeing this message during normal runtime, you have a problem. In that case do a w32tm /resync /rediscover and go from there.
As for item #3, it turns out this is a bug in how the string gets printed. It is barfing on the unicode. It should be printing 15 minutes. See here:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/34987a99-3bc6-4a73-b859-6eab6a53cafe/why-is-the-ntpclient-waiting-3473457-minutes-6-years-for-a-new-timesync-and-what-is-so-special?forum=w7itpronetworking