Techie Fooled A Panicked Daemon And Manipulated Time Itself To Get Servers In Sync
The Register, Monday, August 25th, 2025
Network Time Protocol sometimes needs help from a temporal cops
Why, look at the time! 7:30 AM on Friday morning, the moment at which The Register regularly runs a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that shares your finest tech support stories.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Kim" who was asked to investigate an air-gapped lab in which time had become unhelpfully inconsistent.
"The problem was that an application server was more than five minutes out of sync with the domain controller that served as the lab's Network Time Protocol (NTP) server," Kim told On Call.