This topic comes up periodically so I thought I would just place a note/reminder here. The general problem is that PC's on a network are not all synchronized to the server's time clock, causing all kinds of problems. By default, most PC's get configured to synchronize their clocks periodically to some internet server (like time.windows.com) but a better scheme would be for all of the client PCs to synchronize to the application server's clock. This is particularly hard to set up. For Linux servers, here's a HOWTO that can step you through it:

http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/wiki/index.php/Quick_HOWTO_:_Ch24_:_The_NTP_Server

Note that in the ATE environment you can query the ATE client's time and compare it with the server's time to detect when they are out of sync. See AG_DATETIME in the ashdevnotes or TAB(-10,64) in the documentation for details.

Well at least this proves that i tried

In a windows setup - is there a scheme where you sync network PC's to the one that is deemed the "server"?

Thanks.

Basically you have to have an NTP server on the network that all the workstations can use. I think that requires a proper Windows Server though. In theory though, it shouldn't matter what NTP server the clients use, as long as they all use it frequently enough so they don't get badly out of sync.

The default synchronization internal is 7 days, and that is apparently plenty to allow individual PCs to deviate substantially. To compound matters, the default server, time.windows.com, may be unreliable (due to being overloaded?), leading some blogs to suggest choosing an alternate, such as pool.ntp.org (or ideally, one on the local network).

Forcing it to resync more often is a bit tricky, but can be done by setting up a scheduled task. Here's a site that explains the process clearly:
Make Windows recsynchronize time more frequently . (I tried it on my Windows 7 machine and it seems to work, or at least forcing it to run manually does fix the time, which suggest that it should work when it runs daily.)

There are also third-party clock utilities which allow you to easily configure the sync interval to be shorter. One I found is Atomic Clock Sync (but I haven't tried it so use your own judgment).