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I really need to keep time tightly in sync between my Windows 2008 R2 servers and was expecting that Windows Time Service will do that... but sometimes difference between my clocks is over couple seconds.

Are there any utilities that can help me out?

Also, I looked into answers here, but no luck - most of them are for syncing clock with difference over 0.5 sec, which is unacceptable for me.

I would appreciate any kind of help on this topic.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I'm using GoGrid as hosting provider.

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Have you looked into hardware NTP appliances? symmetricom.com/products/ntp-servers/ntp-network-appliances – sam Jun 13 '11 at 11:11
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2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

NTP can be configured to be VERY precise and although is supported by Windows Time Service MS doesn't ensure that their implementation is too accurate so you could use a third-party version such as THIS.

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Built-in Windows NTP is not very accurate? Interesting; what order of inaccuracy are we talking here? Hundreds of milliseconds? Tens? Milliseconds? – Piskvor Jun 13 '11 at 12:45
Have a look at the NTP wiki page I linked to, it states they can be off between 1-2 seconds or so. – Chopper3 Jun 13 '11 at 12:53
♦: Whoa!</reeves> Without going into a rant, that is, um, all kinds of broken; given that network time sync has been a solved-and-boring problem for what, twenty years? Thirty? Especially since the actual Windows system clock is quite capable of sub-millisecond accuracy. (Makes me curious what prompted this design decision) – Piskvor Jun 13 '11 at 14:25
I know dude, freaky eh! – Chopper3 Jun 13 '11 at 15:36
@Piskvor - Tell me about it... I freaking went nuts yesterday that I can't have same time on two servers. Thanks for the link Chopper3! – kape123 Jun 14 '11 at 8:29
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up vote 2 down vote

The sensible way to solve the problem is, as Chopper3 suggests, to use NTP. Failing that you could use GPS dongles in the devices - but I don't know which ones update the system clock.

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Actually, where high precision is required, there are GPS modules specially built for receiving precise time signal (there are stratum 1 NTP servers which use the GPS as their clock source instead of a local atomic clock). See e.g. this: timefreq.com/page3269/ntv100.aspx – Piskvor Jun 13 '11 at 12:48
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