Computers can be finickity about time but they’re often not very good at keeping it. My desktop computer, for instance, seems to lose time at a ridiculous rate. Computer hardware has included a variety of devices for measuring the passage of time from Programmable Interval Timers to High Precision Event Timers. Operating systems differ in the way that they use that hardware, perhaps counting ticks with the CPU or by delegating completely to a hardware device. This VMware PDF has some interesting detail.
However it’s done, it doesn’t always work. The hardware is affected by temperature and other environmental factors so we generally synchronise with a more reliable external time source, using NTP. Windows has NTP support built in, the W32Time service, but it only uses a single time server and isn’t intended for accurate time. From this post on high accuracy on the Microsoft Directory Services Team blog,
“W32time was created to assist computers to be equal to or less than five minutes (which is configurable) of each other for authentication purposes based off the Kerberos requirements”
They quote this knowledgebase article:
“We do not guarantee and we do not support the accuracy of the W32Time service between nodes on a network. The W32Time service is not a full-featured NTP solution that meets time-sensitive application needs. The W32Time service is primarily designed to do the following:
- Make the Kerberos version 5 authentication protocol work.
- Provide loose sync time for client computers.”
So, plus or minus five minutes is good enough for Kerberos authentication within a Windows domain but it’s not good enough for me.
NTPD
I’ve been experimenting with the NTPD implementation of the NTP protocol for more accurate time. NTPD synchronises with multiple NTP servers but only synchronises when a majority agree. I’m using the Windows binaries from Meinberg. Meinberg also have a monitoring and configuration application, called NTP Time Server monitor, which is very useful.
The implementation is straightforward, so I won’t go into it in detail. Install the service. Install Monitor. Add some local time servers from pool.ntp.org to your config and away you go.
I do, however, want to describe an issue that we had with synchronisation on our servers. Wanting more accurate time for our application, we installed NTPD and immediately started getting clock drift. Without NTPD running, the clocks were quite stable but with it running, they would drift out by a number of seconds within a few minutes.
A quick Google led me to this FixUnix post and I read this quote from David:
“Do you have the Multi-Media timer option set? It was critical to getting
good stability with my systems”
The link was broken but I eventually found this page which describes the introduction of the –M flag to NTPD for Windows. This runs the MultiMedia timer continuously, instead of allowing it to be enabled occasionally by applications like Flash.
Cutting a long story slightly shorter, it turns out that the –M flag was causing the clock drift on our Windows servers. Removing that option from the command line means that our servers are now happily synchronising with an offset of less than 300ms from the time source.
Tardis
As I mentioned, my desktop computer is very inaccurate. NTPD can’t keep it in check so I’m trying a different approach – Tardis 2000. So far, so good. I’m not sure about the animated GIFs on the website though.