On Call 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.

His inquiries led to the discovery that all the servers were out of synch with the NTP server, and that while staff had known about the problem for over a year nothing had been done.

Higher-ups eventually got wind of the situation and issued an e

See Full Page