w32tm and seeding the initial time

[Guest]

Hi,

I'm building a completely automated installation using XPE for our Point of
Sale application and I want the PC's to automatically load with the correct
date and time. I have setup NTP on XPE and it works fine however I have to
initially seed the time to with +|- 50000 seconds otherwise NTP thinks the
external time source is wrong and won't update the XPE time. This is due to
the XPE PC starting with some time/date setting outside the tolerance for NTP
i.e. the date could be out by days or years when the PC first starts. Once I
have seeded the time to within a few hours of the NTP server then the NTP
client on the XPE PC will synchronise the time correctly.

My question is how can I seed the time initially - idealy I'd like to read
the NTP server from a script and hen use the DOS date & time commands to set
the time correctly so that NTP will keep everything in sync. All of this has
to be done within a script.

Many thanks,

Peter Arians.

 

[Andrew Burns]

Peter

NTP is not a hard protocol, maybe you could write your own client?
There could be sharware / freeware command line clients that would
allow you to ignore the time variance.

 

[KM]

Peter,

Just wondering where did you get the 50000 secs value from? Do you have a link to a good article about it that you can share with
us? Or did you just figure it out by experimenting with the time sync on your client machine?

I mean XP NTP client indeed will fail to sync with a server when the client time is too far from the server time. But I didn't know
the exact range.

=========
Regards,
KM

 

[Guest]

HI,

You can work out the tolerance gap by looking at the PC current time and
then trying to sync to an NTP server. In the event log you get an error 34
that shows you the variance and after a few trials you can work out what
windows thinks is acceptable (probably and RFC stipulation).

I've solved my problem by finding a port of the Unix command NTPDate which
is used to initialy seed the NTP time on a unix box - exactly what I need


Thanks fro the responses

Regards,

Peter Arians