Clock Skew and You

  • Article

We had an issue where the clocks on various hosts got offset beyond the margin allowed by an application we were testing.  Here's a way to scan hosts for their clock skew relative to a known good server:

function Get-RemoteTime {
      param (

[String[]]$computerName = @($env:COMPUTERNAME)

)

      foreach ($computer in $computerName) {

if (!$computer) { continue; }

$localTime = Get-Date;

$time = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $computer Win32_LocalTime;

$remoteTime = ("{0}/{1}/{2} {3}:{4}:{5}" -f $time.year, $time.month, $time.day, $time.hour, $time.minute, $time.second) -as [DateTime];

$skew = [Math]::Abs([int]($localTime - $remoteTime).TotalSeconds);

            $computer | Select-Object @{

n = 'Computer';

e = { $_; }

}, @{

n = 'LocalTime';

e = { $localTime; }

}, @{

n = 'RemoteTime';

e = { $remoteTime; }

}, @{

n = 'Skew';

e = { $skew; }

}

}

}