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Tuesday November 29, 2005

Time Synchronization Software

After starting to read Faster by James Gleick, an interesting book on how virtually everything we do nowadays has been accelerated, primarily due to the acceleration of new technology, I thought it was about time to try to setup something to automatically adjust the clocks on my computers, so that they are all synchronized with a time server on the Internet.

For years and years, this used to be really easy on my Solaris box at work. I just had to run (as root):

  # rdate datehost

The datehost machine seems to have now gone away.

So I started with a goggle for "time synchronization software" and saw that there was basically two good places to start: the ntp.org website or the NIST website. I decided to go with the latter.

I was able to download a simple Windows executable that allowed me to easily sync the time on my computer over the Internet with an NIST server:

I now needed a solution for my Solaris boxes at work. NIST also has an ftp site with various source code. I downloaded a read.me file, a Makefile, two source files ( sw.c and tcp_time_client.c).

Running:

  % make nistime

made the executable (after I'd fixed up the Makefile to include the missing libraries that are now needed to build simple network software such as this). When I tried to run it (as root), the connection was refused. We have a firewall here, so I simply ran it in conjunction with a script that would let me tunnel it through a SOCKS proxy. I then set it up with a cron job, so that this synchronization will automatically occur each night.

I should be able to compile and run the same program on my Mac and do something similar there.

But why is this so involved? Aren't we at an age now where all major OS software should have this time synchronisation software automatically installed and readily available?

Perhaps I'm just missing something obvious...

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