How to Synchronize Time on a Closed Network

Problem: We have a closed network at work but the machines on it should all be in sync and it is somewhat critical.

Solution: We found a product called, "ClockWatch Cell Sync" from Beagle Software that polls the CDMA time signal from cell towers. Pretty slick idea, and works great!

Basically we setup a workstation and attached the Cell Sync device on it (plugs into a serial port), and installed the ClockWatch software. Once configured the software polls the CDMA signal from the local cell towers, just like your cell phone does, and adjust the computer clock accordingly if needed. The software can also be configured as a time server and can "listen" to a port waiting for time requests to come in from other clients.

Trying to configure a Windows XP workstation to sync to the time server was turning out to be a problem (isn't anything when Windows is involved?). I found a nifty little program called, "Dimension 4" from Thinking Man Software that helps sync your computer to a time server. It worked right away without having to do anymore fussing with the registry.

It's up and running. We have one machine running Dimension 4 syncing with the time server and it works like it should. Now for the pain in the butt of getting our Windows 2003 server to use the time server as its external time source so the closed domain will have a nice stable time as well. I tried running Dimension 4 on the server, but for some reason it's not working like it did for the workstation.

The workstation and the time server are in the default workgroup, "WORKGROUP", but the other machines are in their own domain. I can "see" the time server from the domain if I ping it, but for some reason the Dimension 4 program can't sync to it.

This has been an all-day project so far setting this all up, and as usual, Windows is giving me fits! Why the heck they can't just make a simple admin tool to allow you to choose an external time source is beyond me. There's a lot of registry hacking going on, and so far what I have configured SHOULD work, but it does not seem like it is... Grrr...

I'll append this article once I get things ironed out.