[lug] What's up with the NIST time servers (fwd)

[Gary Hodges]

I have six Win9.x machines located around the country that use a scheduling
program called Clockman95 to set machine time nightly.  I know little about this
application, other than making it work.  Clockman95 uses a scripting language to
accomplish various tasks.  There are also various tools included to automatically
build various scripts, one of which is to set machine time using a time server.
The script dials an ISP to establish a connection, then sets the time to whatever
time server is in the script.  In my case, I dial the NIST 1-800 number to
establish my connection, and set the time using time-A.timefreq.bldrdoc.gov.  A
quick scan through the log files on these six machines indicate five of them have
been having trouble connecting to the time server.  A closer scan at one log file
indicates it was in early April when I started getting "time outs."  Lately (for
the same machine) it has been 4-6 "time outs" to every connect, which is about
what I have observed with the 3-4 Linux machines I operate here that use rdate
and the same time server.  Curiously, the machine located in Las Vegas seemingly
has no trouble connecting, though there are other strange things going on with
the time on that particular machine.  A "failed" log file entry looks like this:

Thu May 10 00:10:50 2001 -- Error attempting to adjust time:/Couldn't connect to
"time-A.timefreq.bldrdoc.gov": WSock: Timed out waiting for response

And some Linux content for the list...  One of the things I liked about rdate was
it also set the time in the BIOS.  That's a feature I would like to have with
whatever I replace rdate with.

Gary


> Finally, if there are problems with programs OTHER than rdate, please
> give me as much information as you can about the program, the error
> message (if any), etc. If the program is something that is not in
> one of the common things, it would help if you could tell me how it
> communicates with our servers and what sort of reply it expects.