[ntp:questions] Synchronizing against a free-running server

[Jeroen Mostert]

On 2013-04-15 17:48, David Woolley wrote:
> Jeroen Mostert wrote:
>
>> sync to within 1 second is not something w32time can promise (although that's
>> probably more a problem on the client side than the server side).
>
> Modern w32time's can achieve this, but generally won't do so out of the box, and
> the number of people who run it in a configuration much different from that must
> be quite few.

Now you tell me, I've just installed ntpd on all the machines in our network!

Just kidding. Even if I learned how to configure w32time like this it would 
still be of limited value because the machines are not all using the same 
Windows version, there's no way to upgrade w32time (AFAIK), the settings are 
poorly documented at best and even if w32time can /de facto/ achieve better 
results, the fact that Microsoft explicitly says "good for you if you do but we 
are really putting no support into that scenario" convinces me that banking on 
it is something you should only do if the costs of rolling out ntpd are really 
prohibitive for some reason.

That's ignoring the fact that 1 sec is by far not good enough for my particular 
scenario, but that's another discussion altogether.

-- 
J.