I've been busy...  Got a lot of nodes up and a lot of resources for people to connect to...  AND I am now tunneled into places like Hawaii and Paris...

But one little nagging bug seems to be biting me in the butt - TIME!

Now that I am tunneled to different sides of the planet, the time doesn't hit the internet anymore to pickup the right time on all my nodes.  AND I have some cameras that need to have their time set every time they reboot.

Whats the easiest way to setup one of my Linux/Windoze servers or maybe even one of my Windoze PC's as a time server for my local mesh - so I can put it ON my mesh for all my nodes to see WITHOUT having to reach out to the internet?  (Because the tunneling stuff seems to be blocking it...?)

Anyone have any suggestions?

Bill - N5MBM

www.n5mbm.net

http://n5mbm.endoftheinternet.org:8084/cgi-bin/mesh

I found an NTP service for my Shack PC running Windoze 7 from meinbergglobal.com.

Now that it is operational...  other PC's on the network see it.  But...  I still don't see my nodes finding the NTP server on the network and some of my nodes think it is Jan 1, 1970?!?!

Maybe it is lack of sleep but I seem to remember you could edit something in BBHN to look at a specific address...  And NOW I can't find that info! LOL

Any ideas guys?

Bill - N5MBM

www.n5mbm.net

I figured it out - and I am posting it here for anyone else that wants to try syncing the time on all their nodes...

Thanks to N2MH out in West Orange, he has a time server setup on his PBX box and he gave instructions on how to edit the /etc/init.d/ntpclient config file on the BBHN nodes.

I used WinSCP to get into my node(s) and edited this file and replace both of the entries for "us.pool.ntp.org" with the address of his time server (10.148.231.14) I could see through the tunnel on the mesh.  After a HARD reboot (a softboot from the web interface won't do)  After about 3 or 4 minutes, it synced!  It worked!

So this ought to work on my local end of the network too - right?  I went hunting and found Meinbergglobal.com's NTP software for Windoze 7 machines.  I installed it and the shack PC is now synced with UTC to a pretty close tolerance.  YAY! Now my shack PC became an NTP server on my local mesh network as well. 

I went in and reconfigured my node(s) again and I just put in the "10." networking address of my shack PC in place of his PBX time server address and this worked as well!

Now all my nodes are looking to my shack PC (which never gets shut off and sees the mesh AND the local network AND the internet) for NTP services.

And my nodes no longer think it is January 1970... :)  Mission accomplished!

Bill - N5MBM