Hi, What is the best way to synchronize the time on four individual NT systems? The systems are connected to eachother via TCP/IP. Thanks Raoul Huisman Huisman.IT
Use the w32time service. This can be downloaded from the Microsoft site. This runs as a Nt-Service Generally, the NT domain controller will be synchronized to a router on the Internet or to a time-server, i..e, check your local configuration. Generally only takes 5-minutes per machine to install.
If I may add my 5c worth, it also woks fine from Win95 and win2K as well but I do believe you have to set up a time server on your network in order for it to provide the time stamp information.
> Use the w32time service. This can be downloaded from the Microsoft
> site. This runs as a Nt-Service
>
> Generally, the NT domain controller will be synchronized to a router
> on the Internet or to a time-server, i..e, check your local
> coonfiguration.
If you don't have a time server locally you can use this free utility to timesynch with servers all over the world:
http://www.thinkman.com/dimension4/index.html
This program will timesynch periodically or do a timesynch once and then exit. It uses NTP like many other systems but the nice thing about it is that it has the list of public time servers built right into it. I don't know how sophisticated it is in terms of dealing with propagation delays but it works well for me on my home and office systems.
My NT4.0 Workstation responds to this request without having any special setup or software running. It seems to be a standard NetBIOS function. BTW, the latest version of Samba for Linux has an option to enable the time server function also.
You can also synchronise your internal time server to an external reference time server via the Internet but that takes a bit more work.
Regards
Peter Whalley
Managing Director
Magenta Communications Pty Ltd
121 King Street,
Melbourne, VIC 3000
Australia.
I agree with Peter Whalley, the use of NET TIME is a very fast way to sync two or more computers.
I used this command in differents proyects, I created a BAT file which was included in my Starup directory in the ADMINISTRATOR profile, because you need to have Administrator acccess to do this. This BAT file was origanizated in this way
Must delete all previous tasks posted in the AT
command Create this new task or a series of scheduled tasks for AT command.
How is the time synchronization handled internally in a PC? If your local clock differs from the time server's clock, and it is adjusted, an amount of time "disappears" when the local clock is set forward, or an amount of time "happens again" when the clock is set backwards.
This can be quite awkward when you have scheduled certain events to occur on certain times; they can now be completely skipped or be executed twice.
(sideline: reminds me of a large telephone company which handled it DST wrong. They programmed "Is it now Sunday, 03:00? If yes set the clock back to 02:00". This worked fine, but one hour later it was again 03:00, so the clock could never advance any further than 03:00, which was only an error in 300 systems around the country discovered the next morning).
In Unix, when the time is adjusted, it does this gradually by adding only 18 or 22 msec per clock interrupt of 20 msec, so in due course you get at the correct time without any timewarps, which are not always allowed.