I was flipping through my new “The Complete Guide to NetWare 4.1” and noticed it mentioned syncing time on NetWare servers to external sources. This got me to wondering what server administrators might have used in the 1990s for setting time on their NetWare 3.x/4.x servers. Today we use NTP over the Internet, or GPS receivers, or from the cellular network to synchronize time. NetWare 4.x has a TCP/IP stack and could technically use the Internet to get to NTP servers, I have a feeling a lot of organizations weren’t yet on the Internet and still had a need for setting reliable time.
Off the top of my head I thought of dialing up the NIST time service (ACTS) with a modem or some sort of WWV radio receiver hooked up to a RS-232 serial port on your NetWare server, and some sort of Netware Loadable Module (NLM) to interface with it. GPS receivers were probably starting to be available by then and probably very expensive. Whatever the reference, you’d probably still need something that used a RS-232 port to interface with the server. I don’t recall seeing too many ads for clock sources in magazines back then but surely there was something. I guess if anything there was dialing your local bank’s time and temperature phone number and setting it manually that way.
I eventually found this article on the old Novell support website, “Time in the NetWare Environment“. Down at the bottom is a list of hardware and software that could maintain time on NetWare servers and I went searching to see if I could find any of them. I’m really interested in the ones that could dial up with a modem because I have a modem and the NIST time service is still functioning today.
Time Master
A NLM that appears to synchronize time just between a NetWare server and DOS clients. I found it on a shareware CD on Internet Archive, but it doesn’t seem to support external reference sources.
CTS-10 card and Odetics RTCTOOLS.NLM
This one was interesting, I didn’t even know there was a hardware (ISA) card that was a WWV clock receiver. It was made by Coordinated Time Link Co in Santa Clara, CA. There was an NLM that would speak to this CTS-10 card and set the server time. Major Jackyl on vogons.org has the only photographs I’ve seen of the card from 2024. Then there was somebody on the time-nuts mailing list in 2011 asking about the card. They claim they’ve used the card for a long time but the software doesn’t support anything beyond the year 2010.
C-Note Software – Cadence
A NLM that used a dial-up modem to synchronize to NIST. I was able to find the old Polygon website on Internet Archive but the software looks like it was on a FTP server that wasn’t archived and requires a license key.
Legal File Software – WANTimes
Another modem dialer NLM. CompuServe forums are long dead and I haven’t found any archives that carry the NOVUSER forum nor found that WANTIM.ZIP file in any software stashes.
then there were two others to set clocks from UK and German national clocks.
So I haven’t turned up any of the original NLM software, which is a bummer. The AppNote provided a short BASIC example for dialing up to NIST but it’s far from a finished program, and I think you’d have to stop NetWare and run it from DOS to set the computer’s RTC. NIST also provided some ACTS modem dialer software too (still works!), but these would’ve required bringing down NetWare and running from DOS as well.
For now what I’m doing on my NetWare 4.1 server is calling out to a packet driver and mTCP during AUTOEXEC.BAT, running the SNTP client, then going on to load the NetWare server. It’d be a lot neater to have a NLM that could dial periodically.
