SUMMARY: xntpd

I got a slew of answers for this-- Thanks to everyone who replied.

The majority of replies specified that an unpatches xntpd on Solaris 7 just
won't work well at all.  The patch is freely available at sunsolve and in
the recommended patch cluster.

Tim Chipman added that:

some machines have clock-chip hardware that isn't quite as
effective with default system settings.

In particular, for example, SunBlade 100 machines will lose time
steadily, requiring MANY updates against the NTP server to stay vaguely
close to "real time"

There is a simple fix in this kind of case ; addition of the following
line to /etc/system and rebooting, yields a sunblade 100 that keeps time
as well as any other machine doing the job properly..

set sys_tick_freq = 5549020

Doug Grnzow said something similar as well:

If you are losing 3 minutes per day, this is a hardware problem with your
system clock.  xntpd takes a few minutes at startup to establish a
relationship between the system clock and the time reported by the time
servers.  If your system clock is losing time that fast, xntpd's
calculations will all be off the scale and it will not trust the time
servers, so it will not attempt to sync up with them.
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