Now that we have your clients time syncing, it is time to start thinking about running your own time server. If you have more than 20 or 30 clients trying to sync their clocks to an NTP server outside of your network, do yourself a favor and set up a time server of your own. It’s easy! It’s cheap! Here’s how to do it:

Time servers don’t have to be high powered machines. You can get time server software to run on just about anything. When I began running a time server here at HHS, I was using an old Macintosh LCIII to sync the clocks of 400+ desktop machines. This was literally a machine that I pulled out of the scrap heap and gave it one last task to do before I retired it.

Currently, I use an old Compaq Deskpro with 64MB of RAM and a Pentium Pro (120mhz) Processor. It is running Windows NT 4 Workstation and I’m running a free piece of software called Net Time. NetTime is an open source project I found on Source Forge. The real advantage to it was that I could set it up to run as a service on an NT/2000 box, so it didn’t require a user to be logged in for it to be acting as a time server. It currently syncs the clocks of 800+ computers, both Windows and Mac clients.

There are many other options. If the machine you have is a Windows 98 box, you could also use NetTime or another product called WorldTime by a company called Paw Print. World Time does more than just act as a time server. It is also a sophisticated desktop clock.

For those of running Mac OS 9 or earlier, check out a freeware program called Daemon. It isn’t elegant, but it is what I used on the LCIII. Daemon only acts a server. You’ll need to use the built in NTP client in OS 8.6 or higher to sync the server’s clock to an NTP server on the Internet so your server’s clock is correct.

For those of you running Mac OSX or Linux, there are a bunch of options. For one possible option, surf to http://www.ntp.org/downloads.html.

So what are you waiting for? Go set up a time server!!