Onvif Vs Proprietary, Time Synch Issues

I actually just tried both those addresses (time-a.nist.gov and nist-a.gov) and they seem to be off by a couple of seconds, so you're not doing anything wrong.

I'd sync them both to the same server. It should solve the problem. If it doesn't, I'd be curious to hear about it.

I personally sync to north-america.pool.ntp.org but as long as they're all the same source, it shouldn't matter.

Ethan,

Yes, your suggestion solved my issue. Now all cameras are synchronizing superbly! I found that two of my three Speco cameras were synching to a third time server. So, I learned a valuable lesson, make sure all are synching with the same time server.

Something extremely strange about that nist-a.gov server. Like it shouldn't exist, since the domain is unregistered:

Nor is it part of the nist round robin, time.nist.gov:

But DNS has it and it does return time

Although it is 2 seconds slow from time-a.nist.gov

I strongly suggest you discontinue use of a-nist.gov, for obvious reasons. Best practice is to use time.nist.gov since this uses the pool.

Yes. The time.nist.gov seems to do fine for me. In the Speco Camera firmware time-a.nist.gov is one of the options in a drop down menu.

It took me a bit to get one of my cameras to synch. I had to restart the camera, do a manual synch, do a synch to computer time, and then synch to a time server before it finally synched to the rest of the cameras.

I don't think I mentioned "nist-a.gov", but rather "time-a.nist.gov", which is one of the default options in the Speco Camera firmware time settings drop down menu.

Good catch, I thought I looked over my original post pretty well, but you caught it. That was a mistake on my part as I meant to post just two servers, time-a.nist.gov. and time.nist.gov. So, only two servers should've been mentioned in my original post.

You are correct.

The global address time.nist.gov is resolved to all of the server addresses below in a round-robin sequence to equalize the load across all of the servers.

Whether you connect to a server using the name or the IP address, it is a bad practice to “hard-code” a particular server name or address into a device so that these parameters cannot be changed by the end user if that becomes necessary at some future time.

All users should ensure that their software NEVER queries a server more frequently than once every 4 seconds. Systems that exceed this rate will be refused service. In extreme cases, systems that exceed this limit may be considered as attempting a denial-of-service attack.

http://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi