[Samba] How 'accurate' is time sync on the samba server?

[David Brodbeck]

I'm using this one on all my workstations: 
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/ntp_spool/html/hints/winnt.html

We have about 20 machines, so instead of imposing that kind of load on some
other site's time server I set up three of our systems (servers that don't
get rebooted much) as NTP servers, each with the two other servers in the
pool and two external time servers as peers.  (This is the sort of
configuration recommended in the NTP docs.)  The workstations then use those
three servers for synchronization.  The results have been really excellent.
It took a few hours for them to converge, but now all our computers are
usually within 10 ms of each other unless they've just been rebooted.  You
don't have to do anything this elaborate, but the advantage of having three
time sources is if one machine's clock goes off, the other two will outvote
it and the clients will ignore it.

One word of warning: Microsoft security update Q328310 seems to interact
with this service on NT 4.0 and cause blue screens.  This is a problem
Microsoft has acknowledged, which leads me to believe it's not strictly a
function of the NTP service.  I haven't seen the problem on Windows 2000
Professional.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Williams [mailto:jwilliams at courtesymortgage.com]
> Sent: Monday, May 05, 2003 7:42 PM
> To: John H Terpstra
> Cc: samba at lists.samba.org
> Subject: Re: [Samba] How 'accurate' is time sync on the samba server?
> 
> 
> Well, as it stands right now, what I noticed is that the 
> server may be at 
> 4:05:15
> At the same time, the test client was at 4:04:45. Even though 
> it is roughly 
> a 30-35 second time difference, I would prefer it to be a 
> little closer. 
> Maybe around 10-15 second time difference, if possible.
> 
> I thought about installing a client NTP service, such as one from 
> http://www.analogx.com
> 
> Probably best to install clients on each one I would imagine then?
> 
> Jason