If your building is like mine, you have hundreds of computers to keep track of and very little time to do it. One thing that has made my life easier in a small way is keeping all of the clocks on my computers synchronized. “Why bother with syncing the clocks?” you might be asking yourself. There are many reasons. Read on…

Scenario 1: A student messes with the security on the machine or installs an “unauthorized” piece of software. When you go and check the files, you can see by the time/date stamp exactly when it was done, so you have a chance of tracking down the student. Just as you are patting yourself on the back about your fine detective work, you realize that the clock on the computer is wrong. The date is off by a week and the time is off by 47 minutes. ARGH! Wouldn’t it have been nice to have the clock accurate?

Scenario 2: Same situation as above, except this time, what you are interested in is the browser history. Once again, without an accurate time on the system, it is hard to use the history.

Scenario 3: You have scheduled you machines to run admin scripts at specific times of the day. The times coincide with times when the machines are not in use so that the forced restarts won’t kill anyones work. One afternoon, you get a panic call from a computer lab because a student who had just spent all hour writing a paper lost all of his work when the computer spontaneously restarted. Upon investigation, you find the culprit was really your admin script had executed at the wrong time because the time on the computer’s clock had drifted several hours.

Now doesn’t synchronizing clocks seem like a good idea?

In my next post, I’ll describe several methods you can use to synchronize the clocks on your network.