Re: Time sync to Windows. How?
nick said...
> nick wrote:
> > marc wrote:
>
> >>
> >> Any ideas or suggestions?
> >>
> >
> > Hasn't NetTime been abandoned? Anyways, how about pointing the NetTime
> > client on the WinBox to the NetTime Server on the Winbox. Then have a
> > separate NTP client update the time when net access is available.
> >
>
> Okay, curiousity got the better of me so I actually tried this. I booted
> to XP and installed NetTime from Sourceforge. As a test, I set one
> timeserver to 'localhost' and another to a server on the net. To
> 'bootstrap' the NetTime server it needed to connect to the net first.
Yup, that's the problem. The network, not this particular hardware, goes
on the road for client demos and into random locations - even up the odd
mountain - so net connectivity is neither guaranteed nor necessarily
easy to get hold of.
> However, once started, localhost became a valid NTP server. When I shut
> off my cable modem, NetTime still marks 'locahost' as good and I could
> sync to the WinBox from another LinBox on my network.
> Note: It seemed to
> be important that 'localhost' was first in the time server list. NetTime
> would occasionally hang and stop serving time if the outside server was
> unavailable _and_ first on the list.
It's quite a nice tool - for Windows ;-)
In any case, I've found NTP from these folks:
http://www.meinberg.de/
which has a specific option to failover to the system clock.
Funnily enough, this also glitches when the server is rebooted when off
the net, but either starting the monitoring software or restarting the
NTP service kicks it into life. Since the monitoring software can be
started during a login - which is always going to happen in this case -
that works around the problem - although I've emailed the company to see
whether they can provide a config fix, or whether it's a bug.
Sooo much easier with a Linux box, though :-)
--
Best,
Marc
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