Lately, I have spent a lot of time trying out new software products for Anywhere Technology and with those downloads comes the inevitable email from the developer reminding me of login information & tc. In other cases, I have gone through registering for online financial services or using web interfaces to access account information. one of the issues of late that I am surprised by is the number of email servers (used in automatic responses or other automated services) whose time is wrong. In many cases, the time stamp shown on the email is Unix Genesis (1969).
I really would like to know how difficult it is for an administrator to have the time on his/her server properly set. There are a great number of utilities out there that can even take care of this for you. On Unix and *nix systems, you have ntp/ntpd (and the various offshoots) - very trivial to configure, by the way. On OS X you have a setting within System Preferences that will automatically do this for you - even more trivial than *nix systems:
For Windows there are a host of options out there. My favorite has always been Atomic Time Sync from AnalogX. I have not worked enough with Windows 2003 Server to see whether there is an option in the system settings/configuration that now takes care of this automatically. While this may seem like a minor issue to some out there, it is actually a big deal. The most problematic of which has to do with spam detection. One of the methods I employ in detecting spam is forged time stamps - i.e. time stamps that don't make sense. When an email arrives in my inbox that is either 30 years old or from the future, it is unlikely that it is a valid email. On top of this, with the amount of email I receive, those with the wrong time stamp will often go unread for days because I don't see them in the pile of mail that has already been read. There are a number of other reasons one should have the proper time set on an internet server. Many of those reasons are more critical than the ones I listed above. For example, if the time is off on your server, remote backups may be off sync with the intentioned schedule or may not get done at all. It amazes me that I continue to see this on a regular basis - even from large financial sites like eFile - so I repeat the plea of the title: Hostmasters: Please Set Your Server's Time!
For Windows there are a host of options out there. My favorite has always been Atomic Time Sync from AnalogX. I have not worked enough with Windows 2003 Server to see whether there is an option in the system settings/configuration that now takes care of this automatically. While this may seem like a minor issue to some out there, it is actually a big deal. The most problematic of which has to do with spam detection. One of the methods I employ in detecting spam is forged time stamps - i.e. time stamps that don't make sense. When an email arrives in my inbox that is either 30 years old or from the future, it is unlikely that it is a valid email. On top of this, with the amount of email I receive, those with the wrong time stamp will often go unread for days because I don't see them in the pile of mail that has already been read. There are a number of other reasons one should have the proper time set on an internet server. Many of those reasons are more critical than the ones I listed above. For example, if the time is off on your server, remote backups may be off sync with the intentioned schedule or may not get done at all. It amazes me that I continue to see this on a regular basis - even from large financial sites like eFile - so I repeat the plea of the title: Hostmasters: Please Set Your Server's Time!
