SUMMARY: both hosts in-sync w/ UTC, but not each other?

SUMMARY: Our clock is in-sync with UTC +/- 1/10 of a second. The problem was
at their end. The custom application code was either incorrectly setting the
time of an authentication ticket or incorrectly evaluating the time we were
providing.

Nobody provided any secret or hidden Solaris stuff to double-check before
going back to the business partner and saying "no, the problem is on your
side, can I work with your sys-admin?..." Had the developers not fessed-up,
that would've been the next troubleshooting step.


CLARIFICATION: Someone on the list asked how I "manually synced with a
web-based UTC clock." The sync I performed with the web-based UTC clock was
purely manual. From my laptop, I had an ssh session to my server where I was
logged in as root. In a browser window I visited http://nist.time.gov/. I
typed in the date command to set the time at the top of the next minute, and
waited on the java clock at nist to match, then hit enter to execute my date
command.

Cheers,
-John Christian



________________________________

From: sunmanagers-bounces@sunmanagers.org on behalf of John Christian
Sent: Fri 6/3/2005 8:38 AM
To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
Subject: both hosts in-sync w/ UTC, but not each other?



fellow sunmanagers,

A business partner transfers files to us and says our server's time is
incorrect, that we are 2-4 minutes behind UTC. They claim to sync with
official clocks via NTP multiple times every day. While this particular
server
doesn't use NTP (yet) we were only 20 seconds behind.

Using the date command, I manually synced with a web-based UTC clock. All of
the web-based UTC clocks I've found appear to be in-sync with each other. My
server's time appears to be in-sync with all of those clocks, plus or minus
1/10 of a second.

They say we are still 2-4 minutes behind UTC.

I suspect the problem is...
Their custom application code that is checking the timestamps is doing so
incorrectly. (The path of this transfer includes XML, Apache, Tomcat, and
Java)
Their server is not actually in-sync with UTC.
There IS something wrong at my end and I don't know what!

BEFORE I go back to them and say "no, the problem is on your side, can I work
with your sys-admin?..." what are some other things I can check or test to
make absolutely sure the time on my server is accurate to within a second or
less? BTW: this host does not have direct Internet access.

will summarize. TIA
-John
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