What time is it?

I don't know if you saw the apocryphally bad article today, about how Microsoft has been setting server clocks, but it's a wonder the time is ever right :-)

That might explain why I sometimes get a warning my clock is not set right and will not connect to some web pages even when I go to the internet and have my clock updated.

I mentioned that today at work. We use the Insperity time and attendance interface. When you punch out is the recorded time from your machine, their website, or some other source? What happens if it is a random number?

Traditionally, Windows wasn't good at synchronizing to the "true" time. I don't know if this has been corrected.

You could compare with the clock on a mobile phone, they are usually accurate.

Windows does have an NTP client (w32time).

The client is not as good as the Meinberg one. The Meinberg one is likely to have first order dribble correction (so a good portion of the drift is corrected for you).

Windows was set to connect to an NTP server about once a week. This was to prevent Windows from overwhelming whatever it was connecting to (like time.windows.com). But the implementation is merely "a bare minimum correction for the time". The Microsoft desktop support was not intended for any sort of tight sync. It may have been installed, so that SMB/CIFS would work properly (not allow too much clock drift).

W32time seems to wake up, every fifteen minutes. Since there is only one time correction per week, most of the time there is no work to do. The fifteen minute interval suggests they had more ambitious plans for the thing, and the "limp" configuration used by default, was not taking advantage of whatever functions lay hidden in there. A fifteen minute interval, could be suited to a first order dribble correction. You would not query an NTP server in that case, merely make a small correction to the time to compensate for the measured clock frequency offset (quartz crystal error). By making the corrections frequently, you "dribble out" the correction.

You can certainly change the automatic update frequency. That is the most likely thing a user would change. And that is fine as long as you're pointed at "time.mydomain.com" and are abusing your own internal NTP server. Some of the big time servers have anti-hammer protection, and if you pester them too frequently, you'll get blocked (until you change IP and get blocked again).

Paul

hahahaha. The time displayed on my phone (and I confirmed similar issues with a bunch of friends) is a minute off the "real" time.

I first noticed this while listening to "W-I-N-S, 10-10, Westinghouse Broadcasting, serving NY, NJ, and Ct" and the "at the time it'll be 5 pm ... BEEP", and my phone still showed 4:59.

I wrote to the cellco's president's office, got back a call saying that's the way it is...

Curiously the slippage varied from area to area. In one city it was a minute behing, while in another it was just a couple of seconds off.

Oh... I verfied this by also going to "time.gov" (couldn't pick up WWV or CHU...)

danny burstein snipped-for-privacy@panix.com wrote in news:ubrbmg$pjt$ snipped-for-privacy@reader2.panix.com:

I have a TCLA509DL phone. I just checked with the NIST time page and my phone's time is three second later than the web page. I canlive with that. Next time I have my SW portable out I will check with WWV.

I'm guessing you're not with one of the big national US carriers, since they don't have that problem.

You're guessing wrong. Ditto with my friends.

As I said in my original post, it's quite curious in that in _some_ areas my phone does display the correct time, in others it doesn't.

I've worked on the network side of two of the national carriers, and both of them used GPS to sanity-check the network time that gets passed to handsets, with stratum 1 NTP being the primary time source. As a result, it should be extremely unlikely that your handset would be getting the wrong time from the network.

I wonder what a GPS app would show. I sometimes use GPS Status, free version.

It "should be". I agree. And yet that's exactly what was happening.

fwiw, here are portions of the cover letter I had sent over to T-Mobile:

Office of John Legere CEO, T-Mobile

subject: apparent wrong t-mobile time stamp in NYC area

However, my phone, which happened to be next to me, still said 1:59.

I did some more checking, including pulling up the official US Gov't Time Service ("time.gov") and discovered that my phone's display, tied to the t-mobile server, was about 25 seconds slow.

I travelled to Michigan, saw that the times on my phone and the official markers, were synchronized, and thought nothing more of it.

Today I was back in NYC and once again had a chance to compare the time stamps. And yes, once again the one showing on my phone is a half minute behind the "real" time.

Could you ask someone to check into this? Given how many people and pieces of equipment (plus, of course, your own network) uses time signals, this could be an early sign of some trouble. =========

I'm currently in an area where the times are synch'ed correctly.

Next time I'm in NYC, if I remember, I'll check again...

This is the exact meaning of what I said, I was referring to this, just that I never remember the details.

It is funny, because other ntpd implementations only query the server say, once per hour, once sync is obtained. The local clock has to be stable during the interval.

Interesting. Never happens in Linux. There must be some reason the same can't be done in Windows.

I haven't worked there and I don't currently know anyone who does, but I would have expected better. Good luck, I hope you get a satisfactory resolution.