I'm surprised that nobody so far has mentioned NTP. The Network Time Protocol is an Internet standard for clock synchronization (defined in RFC 1305 and RFC 2030, if you're into such things). In fact, NTP as an Internet application pre-dates the world wide web by many years! Rather than just setting your computer at regular intervals to some master clock, it maintains hierarchies/graphs of time servers and clients on the network and keeps good synchronization among them all by estimating the packet travel times between hosts. Everything you ever wanted to know about NTP can be found at http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/ I understand that there is a limited implementation of NTP built into Windows 2000, and a version of the software may be available for NT as well. Otherwise, if you're fortunate enough to use some flavor of UNIX, you can build the standard client software from the sources found at the above site. Some distributions of Linux offer NTP in package form (I use Debian). The software runs in the background, uses very little memory, CPU, or network bandwidth, and makes sure the clock is always right. In my case the accuracy is about one millisecond. This whole scheme assumes that you have an "always on" connection to the Internet, but nowadays that is becoming fairly common. --- Mark Haun University of Illinois, Dept. of ECE markhaun@uiuc.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jan 18 2001 - 09:43:03 PST