NTP service

Would you like to synchronize your computer to the official time of Finland?

The clock of a common PC is not accurate. It may lead or lag several minutes in a month and during a year the error may exceed one hour. This does not matter if you use PC for games only, but if you have several PCs in your local net or if your computer communicates with the outer world via Internet, the exact time may be vital. Electronic commerce in stock exchange and the delivery of official documents and applications via net are a chapter of their own; one minute overdue can cause extensive economical damages or ruin months of work. Transactions in the network are increasing rapidly, both in commercial applications and in public administration.

MIKES maintains the official NTP time service of Finnish time for the needs of public administration. The NTP servers of MIKES are syncronized to the Cs time and frequency standards ("atomic clocks") maintaining the official time of Finland. In near future, synchronization to the GPS system will be included, too. The synchronization is done by using NTP protocol (Network Time Protocol) which is the most common way of synchronizing the PC clocks within Internet. The official service is restricted to selected users only. However, the public service which MIKES acquires from a commercial service provider, is available for everyone. With it, any PC with an Internet connection can be synchronized. These public servers are syncronized to the NTP servers of MIKES. MIKES monitors the public service continuously but does not have responsibility of it.

How?

What you need for the public service is a NTP client program, which synchronizes your computer to the MIKES server. You have the program already in your machine if you are using Linux or the new versions of MacOS. The software for FreeBSD and OpenBSD systems can be found in the form of easily mountable binary files or from "ports" assortment. Heaps of NTP programs for e.g. various Windows versions can be found from Internet (see e.g. http://www.ntp.org and http://www.datum.com). If your PC is connected to the network of an enterprise be aware that it might be already automatically synchronized. This often applies, especially to the Windows 2000 domains.

After you have installed a proper program to your PC, you are asked to give the address of the NTP server to be used in the program set-up. You can synchronize the clock of your PC to a server which is synchronized to the official time of Finland by typing either time1.mikes.fi or time2.mikes.fi in the set-up of the program. MIKES does not maintain these public servers, neither has it responsibility of their function. However, MIKES does continuously monitor the quality of the time they produce.

The precision of time synchronization is strongly dependent on network connections. For example, within an Intranet of 100 Mbits/s uncertainties of even less than 0.0001 second are attainable. The precision is considerably worse when a slow and heavily loaded Internet connection is used.

Further information can be obtained by e-mail from the address time (at) mikes.fi [(at)=@].

Time stamp

In the future, MIKES will probably monitor the precision of the time stamps, which are in connection with public and private electronic transactions. MIKES participates in an extensive, nationwide pilot project on electronic transactions, coordinated by Population Register Centre of Finland.