Re: NTP Public Services Project help - +1 hour setting

Thomas A. Horsley wrote:
[]
> But remember, he said these are windows servers. I'm not sure anyone
> knows what windows servers actually use internally for time (not even
> Microsoft :-). The boxes certainly insist on storing the local
> timezone time in the motherboard time of day clock, but maybe that
> means they just translate to and from UTC at boot and shutdown time.

Internally, the system time in Windows 32 is kept in UTC, and I'm sure the
same will apply to Windows 64.

Yes, the BIOS clock is kept in local time, presumably to help those system
administrators who don't understand UTC.

> On the other had if that was really the only time the innards of
> Windows cared about UTC versus local, you'd think Windows would have
> offered a "keep the damn hardware clock in UTC" option, but I've
> heard stories that a group of sensible Microsoft programmers
> attempted to implement a UTC clock option in Windows and eventually
> were all driven into madness and insanity trying to track down all
> the little corners that cared about time.

I suspect keeping the hardware clock in local time is probably part of the
original PC hardware specification, and the software simply conforms.

> I'm not sure windows really does use UTC (in fact I'm sure the FAT
> filesystem timestamps actually stored on disk are in local time,
> which means at daylight savings time changes you can generate files
> about an hour apart that appear to have been created at the same time
> or even in reverse order). I don't know if NTFS timestamps are UTC or
> not.

Yes, NTFS timestamps are UTC. FAT timestamps, by specification, are local
time. CDFS timestamps are also UTC (I think), which means that the file
modification time displayed will depend on the timezone setting. This
should be true for any OS which keeps timestamps in UTC.

> Who knows, maybe the hazards of bad time keeping (especially for
> timestamps on files of financial data) combined with the
> Sarbanes-Oxley nonsense will force Microsoft to actually provide a
> working UTC option in Longhorn (or whatever the name is these days)...


I'd rather not have some parochial standard forced on Microsoft (or any
other supplier). I find the present "internal in UTC, display in clock
time" quite consistent.

I would welcome Microsoft adopting the NTP software which is discussed
here rather than its own non-standard variant of SNTP.

David


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