On a Completely Different Stratum

I believe all clocks must agree. It's what clocks do. If it doesn't match up with other clocks, it's not even really a clock at all. So it comes as no surprise I'm a stickler for time synchronization. NTP is my bitch. I run it on pretty much every machine I use, see, hear, or of which I get within a twenty foot radius. On Windows systems, I almost exclusively use NetTime, a little piece of Pascal abandonware that runs on everything and, essentially, does no wrong provided you manually assign its NTP hosts: the abandonment notice explicitly calls the built-in list of servers "extremely outdated". It is a darling, wonderful program.

So the other day I was in the Finance department helping to set up a new e-mail alias on everyone's machines, and I noticed that all of their system clocks were wrong. Grumble, grumble. NetTime to the rescue. Some of these systems are running Windows 95 and 98, so I know it's only a matter of a few days before the machines get rebooted and the NetTime software will save the day. That was last week.

Today, a user is having an unrelated e-mail problem, so I sit down at her machine and start to tinker. I notice the system clock is still wrong. Without a lot of fanfare I end up rebooting the machine to fix her problem, surprise, surprise. The time is still wrong. I check to see that I did, in fact, install NetTime on this system. Yup.

Now I'm worried. I get her e-mail working again and proceed immediately to my desk to login to the in-house NTP server and check its time: it's perfect. It's only then that I realize the truth: her time was incorrect, and if I go back up there, I'm guessing it's going to be slow by exactly 60 minutes.

Her computer may not be set to acknowledge Daylight Saving Time, or it may be in the wrong timezone, or both. And it's probably been this way for years, I kid you not. Just thinking about someone so ignorant of their system clock gives me the heebie-jeebies.