Funny, they made a bad copy of tlsdate and sold it as a super new innovation.
Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
11–20 of 169 posts
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#12Windows Time bullshit was one of the most annoying things I dealt with during my years as an IT guy. Registering and unregistering w32time, trying different NTP servers. Trying to figure out why domain systems werent getting their time from the DC. It always felt so... stupid. Surely having the correct time on a device isnt that complicated. Turns out, its not, unless you're on Windows. Somewhat ironic that these days the only Windows system I have to deal with is my gaming PC. It refuses to sync with time.windows.com.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#13I sometimes experience a similar issue with my linux laptop where time jumps to the year 2077 when waking up from sleep. My guess is that it is a hardware glitch as it doesn't happen often, but when it does it is quite impactful. One of the annoying consequences is that some parts of the system decide to clean up "old" data. Surely data that has been stale for 50 years can be deleted, right? I cannot imagine the impa…
I had that with old mac os versions. Fun to finally know why it happened
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#14I can't imagine the sequence of horrible decisions that led to doing this. Like, why would the time service ever want to depend on all this insanity when if it has a network and everything else is bizarro world, just like scrape the time and date text from weather.gov. Or just accept that absent NTP, w32time maybe just shouldn't try to set the clock to whatever a circus clown tells it? This sort of reminds me how the…
This is what puzzles me - while time drift does occur, it tends to be in the form of minor errors which build up over time; large jumps are relatively rare. You'd think the mechanism described in the article would have a failsafe ensuring that only minor time recalibrations are performed.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#15A better solution to secure bootstrapping of time would be NTP+NTS (RFC 8915) using self-signed certificates with unlimited time validity, which can be preloaded with the OS and updated via normal OS updates if the server key is compromised. They would probably need to run their own servers. There are some public NTS servers (e.g. Cloudflare and Netnod), but I have not seen any using long-term certificates specifically for this use case.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#16I can't imagine the sequence of horrible decisions that led to doing this. Like, why would the time service ever want to depend on all this insanity when if it has a network and everything else is bizarro world, just like scrape the time and date text from weather.gov. Or just accept that absent NTP, w32time maybe just shouldn't try to set the clock to whatever a circus clown tells it? This sort of reminds me how the…
This is what puzzles me - while time drift does occur, it tends to be in the form of minor errors which build up over time; large jumps are relatively rare. You'd think the mechanism described in the article would have a failsafe ensuring that only minor time recalibrations are performed.
It kind of depends. There's a lot of poor clocks at boot up time, but a continuously running host usually doesn't get too off, too quickly; I've seen some things, but even at 10% fast/slow, you don't have to jump days unless you're checking infrequently.
On the other hand, with virtualization, who knows how long it's really been between clock ticks. Let's say someone suspends a VM for a couple months and then unsuspends it; hopefully the clock is synchronized, but maybe it isn't, and you do need to jump ahead.
I thought I saw in the article that there are failsafes, but the allowed range is still pretty broad. But reporting is going to tend to be dominated by larger values, because smalller jumps are less likely to be noticed or more likely to be considered an accidental change.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#17While this Windows feature does sound quite bonkers as described, it is also baffling to me that the timekeeping on computers is such a mess; would it really be that difficult to have my multithousand dollar computer keep time at least as well as a dollar-store quartz watch? Have time already set in factory, and be correct to within few hours at least; enough to do networking and more accurate time syncing safely.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#18Blows my mind that anyone would use Windows on a server.
Seemed to work for Stack Overflow.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#19I can't imagine the sequence of horrible decisions that led to doing this. Like, why would the time service ever want to depend on all this insanity when if it has a network and everything else is bizarro world, just like scrape the time and date text from weather.gov. Or just accept that absent NTP, w32time maybe just shouldn't try to set the clock to whatever a circus clown tells it? This sort of reminds me how the…
This is what puzzles me - while time drift does occur, it tends to be in the form of minor errors which build up over time; large jumps are relatively rare. You'd think the mechanism described in the article would have a failsafe ensuring that only minor time recalibrations are performed.
There are a lot of machines out there with a dead battery on the real time clock. Every time they boot, the time is miles out and at some system-determined zero point.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#20While this Windows feature does sound quite bonkers as described, it is also baffling to me that the timekeeping on computers is such a mess; would it really be that difficult to have my multithousand dollar computer keep time at least as well as a dollar-store quartz watch? Have time already set in factory, and be correct to within few hours at least; enough to do networking and more accurate time syncing safely.
Computers have a lot more temperature variations than a typical quartz watch. In the absence of temperature correction, they'll be less accurate.