Computer related question - Starch

Starch

This has nothing to do with heating.

At my office, I have four different computers networked together through a network hub (no server). I'm finding that the individual computers seem to have a mind of their own (gee, what a surprise) from time to time, and the clock settings will just change themselves! I synchronized all four machines' clocks the other day, and now they are all different. One may say it's 9:06, another says 9:02, and so on.

Is there any way to have one computer act as a master "system timekeeper" and synchronize the other machines' clock settings to match its own? Or am I just suffering from wishful thinking again??

Thanks in advance,

Starch

Mike T., Swampeast MO

\"Mind of their own\"

Actually you hit the nail on the head with that. The clock is a function of the system timer & CPU. As system speeds have increased, tiny differences between "identical" devices cause slight errors in "real" time.

Since each computer in your network has its own brain, I think it would be surprisingly complex to truly coordinate their times--it may well require an external clock that is occasionally read by each computer.

First place to look would be your networking software--it may have such a function built-in.

Search "freeware" sites for something like "time coordination."

If you have programming skills, I think this would work:

Write an executable program that creates a dummy file on a SHARED hard drive. Then immediately read the "header" information of this file--it contains the exact time the file was created and this should be the time from the clock in the computer where the drive resides. Set the clock of the computer running the program to this time. Set this to run every day or so in "scheduled tasks" on every computer except the one with the shared drive. This certainly wouldn't give TV station accuracy, but it will be pretty close.

Lee_3

clock sync

This is a common problem in networked environments and solutions do exist for it. The cause as noted in the prior post is that individual system clocks will skew due to minute differnces in the duration of a "tick" from system to system. Over the course of days and weeks these differences can add up to be quite noticable.

The solution is to sync the clocks back up to a common source at least once a day.

Check out http://www.atomtime.com/

I hope this helps, as a home owner I have learned a lot lurking on this site.

Frank_3

What operating system are you using? Windows 95/98/NT/XP? Or something else entirely (bravo for you).

eleft(retired)

download from here

http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?1000000034325

Copy and paste

Starch

It's....

> What operating system are you using? Windows

> 95/98/NT/XP? Or something else entirely (bravo

> for you).



...Windows 98. I tried downloading the atomic clock software, and have installed it on one machine for now. We'll see how it works!

Thanks for all the replies.

Starch

Starch

It's....

...Windows 98. I tried downloading the atomic clock software, and have installed it on one machine for now. We'll see how it works!

Thanks for all the replies.

Starch

Frank_3

Yeah, that'd do it. It's built in to Windows XP, and I think Windows 2000 as well. Which is why I asked about the operating system. Good luck.