sync time of hp server to a microsoft box

[Paul Shammas]

needs to tie primary hp box to mint30{microsoft} for time, and they need to do it during a maintenance window.

How can I do this, also creating a big jump in time that will affect other hp servers that get their time ftom the primary time hp box.

paul

[harry d brown jr]

What (software) do you plan on using for the time syncronization? What kind of databases are in use, what kind of applications, backups, file maintenance, etc...

live free or die
harry

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Paul:

This seems to be a case of the tail wagging the dog. If it were me, I would set up one of your HP servers as an NTP server. That server could in turn synchronize to an Inernet time source such as the U.S. Naval Observatory. All of your other boxes, could then sync to this HP box. There are a number of freely available NTP clients for Windows. NTP isa the weapon of choice because it avoids the king of abrupt changes you are talking about. It basically speeds up or slow down the clocks until they synchronize. With NTP, accuracy across your systems can very easily be maintained to well under 200ms.

If you must make abrupt changes then ,in general, setting clocks ahead is okay but setting them backwards is fraught with peril. File timestamps are confused and database transaction datestamps are then made invalid. You can get into situations were the order of transactions is reversed.

If your problem is simply one of incorrect timezones then you have no problem. TZ only controls how time is displayed not how it is internally kept. You can change TZ at any time and in fact diffrent users can have different TZ settings.

Food for thought, Clay