Category: Time Synchronisation

NTP Time Servers – Are They Affected By Daylight Savings Time?

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Daylight Savings, NTP Time Server
Clocks go forward on March 30, 2014.

Specialists in the design, manufacture and supply of time synchronisation units and digital clocks, Galleon Systems clears up the confusion over the impact of daylight savings time on NTP time servers. 

In March, clocks in the UK go forward one hour in preparation for British summer time, prompting concerns that daylight savings time will cause problems for users of NTP time servers. In a bid to reassure, Galleon Systems clarifies the impact of daylight savings time on NTP time servers in order to calm such concerns.

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Daylight Savings, NTP Time Server

Have the Olympics kept pace with precision timing?

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The accuracy of modern Olympic timing is made possible with the use of high quality timing devices, accurate synchronisation and atomic timing. Regular quartz oscillators are fairly accurate, but they still drift, which means without regular synchronisation, their accuracy would falter UY98UZDDVGGJ . To ensure all timing devices can achieve millisecond accuracy and precise synchronisation with one another, all Olympic timing devices are synchronised with GPS atomic clocks several times a day.

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The Perils of Online Time Servers

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For computer networks, accurate time is essential for preventing errors, fraud and ensures security. Everything from internet banking to air traffic control relies on precise and accurate time, but many organisations take unnecessary risks when it comes to the time on their networks and rely on online time servers instead of a dedicated NTP server

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Using PoE Clocks (Power over Ethernet)

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Power over Ethernet is ideal for powering and controlling wall clocks and other time devices. The accuracy of a network’s NTP time server can be used to maintain an accurate time on the PoE clock. This means the clock will never drift and will always be accurate to the second – ideal for ensuring punctuality in organisations that runs to a tight time schedule. No matter how many clocks are running on the PoE system, they will all maintain the exact same time, eliminating time inconsistencies in large organisations.

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GPS Time Server – Five Reasons to Install

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GPS time servers are a highly accurate and secure method of synchronising a computer network to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). GPS time servers are simple to use and ensure a network is synchronised to s secure form of time. However, many network administrators don’t see the need to use a GPS time server and continue to put their network at risk by using an online source of time for synchronisation. Here are five reasons why a GPS time server is crucial for computer network synchronisation.

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The Greenwich Time Lady

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Time synchronisation is something easily taken for granted in this day and age. With GPS NTP servers, satellites beam down time to technologies, which keeps them synced to the world’s time standard UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

Before UTC, before atomic clocks, before GPS, keeping time synchronised was not so easy. Throughout history, humans have always kept track of time, but accuracy was never that important. A few minutes or an hour or so difference, made little difference to people’s lives throughout the medieval and regency periods; however, come the industrial revolution and the development of railways, factories and international commerce, accurate timekeeping became crucial.

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) became time standard in 1880, taking over from the world’s first time standard railway time, developed to ensure accuracy with railway timetables. Soon, all businesses, shops and offices wanted to keep their clocks accurate to GMT, but in an age before electrical clocks and telephones, this proved difficult.

Enter the Greenwich Time Lady. Ruth Belville was a businesswoman from Greenwich, who followed in her father’s footsteps in delivering time to businesses throughout London. The Belville’s owned a highly accurate and expensive pocket watch, a John Arnold chronometer originally made for the Duke of Sussex.

Every week, Ruth, and her father before her, would take the train to Greenwich where they would synchronise the pocket watch to Greenwich Mean Time. The Belvilles would then travel around London, charging businesses to adjust their clocks their chronometer, a business enterprise that lasted from 1836 to 1940 when Ruth finally retired at the age of 86.

BY this time, electronic clocks had began to take over traditional mechanical devices and were more accurate, needing less synchronisation, and with the telephone speaking clock introduced by the General Post Office (GPO) in 1936, timekeeping services like the Belville’s became obsolete.

Today, time synchronisation is far more accurate. Network time servers, often using the computer protocol NTP (Network Time Protocol), keep computer networks and modern technologies true. NTP time servers receive an accurate atomic clock time signal, often by GPS, and distribute the time around the network. Thanks to atomic clocks, NTP time servers and the universal timescale UTC, modern computers can keep time to within a few milliseconds of each other.