So, what time is it anyhow?

It all depends on your definition of the "correct" time. Here is the U.S. government's:

"Official time in the United States is kept by NIST and the United States Naval Observatory, which averages readings from the 60 atomic clocks it owns. Both organizations also contribute to UTC, the world universal time."

And how accurate are atomic clocks ("atomic time"?)

"After most sources of error are eliminated, atomic clocks get frighteningly accurate. For example, NIST-7, a cesium clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is accurate to five parts in 10¹⁵ . This staggering precision works out to an error of about a billionth of a second per day. To put it another way, this clock will stay within one second of true time for 6 million years. "

Both quotes from "Counting seconds with an atomic clock"
 - (Note: As of 2005 NIST-F1 was so accurate it is estimated that it would take over 60 million years to gain or lose a single second.)

How accurate is DCE's time?

Generally, your computer's time is within just a few seconds of the "real" time.  See below for the exception to this.

We have three time servers that regularly (many times a day) compare their time to each other and to four atomic or GPS clocks on the Internet:

• Two at the University of Wisconsin
• One at the U.S. Department of Energy's ANL (Argonne National Laboratory.)
• One at the University of Illinois

Due to this, our time servers are believed to always be within a few thousandths of second of "atomic time".  Most of the other district level servers (web, financial, student records, etc.) are synchronized with these time servers.

Because to the way Novell Netware synchronizes time, your mail and file servers are slightly less accurate.  They typically stay within five seconds of "atomic time."  These servers are where your computer gets it's time when you log in. 

Then why is the time wrong?

These days, if your computer's time is wrong, it's more likely that the time you are comparing it to is wrong than it is that the computer's time is wrong.  It is still possible, however, for one of our servers to be out of sync with the rest of the network.  

If you ever suspect that the network time is wrong, please go to the Official US Time site.  If network time is indeed wrong, please let someone on the Technology Team know and it will be fixed as soon as possible.