Lost system time and Hunter's Network Monitor script

[Jim Fricke]

First off, love the script. Works very well except.....
I have it set to run every 2 minutes as suggested. But the longer it runs, the more time my system clock loses. This is not a complaint about the script! I have had this problem before to varying degrees but never to this extent. I can notice a 30 second loss of time after only about 10 minutes of running! (On a fresh boot)
If I disable this script I'll lose maybe 2 minutes over the course of a whole day.
I've seen the time loss subject discussed several times on this board on and off but haven't found a resolution other than frequently resetting the clock. I sync it with another machine on the network twice a day.
The other morning the coffee didn't come on at 5:00 am. I checked and it was because my event to syncronize the clock ran at 4:20 am (HomeSeer time) and that set the system clock ahead of the event schedule. My wife considers this a very serious problem!
HomeSeer is running on Windows 98 (original version with all the patches)
On a Pentium Pro 333Mhz with 192 Megs of Ram
Has anyone else seen this problem with this particular script? I suspect the problem is so pronounced because the script runs so frequently.
I'm running 1.5.2 build 28
Any advice out there would be much appreciated!

Jim

[Hunter Green]

Not only does it run frequently, but it frequently runs an external command-line program which is doing network stuff.

It might be worthwhile to do a little experimentation if you have the time. Perhaps comment out the call to the ping command (replacing it with something that sets the variable i to 1, so pings always seem to succeed) and run it for a while, to see if the problem goes away. Another test: replace the ping command with some other DOS command that doesn't involve the network, to see if it's network traffic that's doing it -- perhaps because of something odd about your network card. And another test: try using hs.Ping instead, as that still uses the network but doesn't use the DOS shell.

Hopefully we can narrow it down through tests like this, now that you've got it somewhat repeatable.

Nucleus Home Automation

[Jim Fricke]

Time allowing, I'll try to do some testing today. It seems my furnace blower is out at the moment and I'll have to give that priority.

[bfaust]

I don't know why, but I can't get any status at all out of the script. I have 4 vitural devices that load in my startup file....

hs.speak "Welcome to Home Seer"
hs.run "restore_state.txt"
hs.SetDeviceString "q1","192.168.0.1"
hs.SetDeviceString "q2","192.168.0.10"
hs.SetDeviceString "q3","192.168.0.11"
hs.SetDeviceString "q4","192.168.0.12"

Made an event to run the script every 2 minutes but nothing happens, except the log shows the event triggered.

Web page shows the ip addresses of the devices, however it also shows the status unknown icon. Zip file was unzip in the Homeseer dir and all files fell into the directories as noted in the setup file.

Help, please

[bfaust]

thinking I may have a bad virtual device name for any given device, I named em all the same (for now) Network Device, hoping to see one icon appear.

[Jim Fricke]

Well I got the furnace fixed but my time has still been very limited lately.
Anyway, I have (Had) 4 devices set up for the script. @ PC's, a router, and Network Connection. The latter pings an outside router that I identified from some line quality tests on DSLreports.com. I disabled this ping and show far less loss of time. I figured that this one device could be taking a little longer to ping. I'm on Earthlink and they're having some major problems here in Chicago with latency and packet loss. It seems my theory is correct. It further seems (and this is unlikely) that time stands still during script execution on my PC.
The short of it is that my time loss is much less as long as I'm only pinging my LAN. Perhaps I can find a different destination to ping that doesn't get bogged down by Earthlinks problems. Oh and further proof. Earthlinks problems are very pronounced in the evening. At midday I logged into the machine from work and it had only lost a couple of minutes in 6 hours. I got home about 8 pm tonight and it had lost 32 minutes.

Thanks,

Jim

[Hunter Green]

I don't think that proves that time stands still when a script is running -- I bet it proves that time stands still while a script is using WScript.Shell to execute an external DOS program like ping. Whether that's the fault of WScript.Shell or DOS or the ping command or your network drivers or network card, I can't tell without the results of the kinds of experiments I mentioned, which would rule some of these possibilities out.

Nucleus Home Automation

[Rupp]

http://www.worldtimeserver.com/

-Rupp

[Jim Fricke]

I agree that more testing is required. And I will do that as I can and report the results back here. Time is a very precious commodity for me right now as someone very close to me is in the hospital. I'll try to implement some of the tests later tonight and should see some results tomorrow.
Rupp, thanks for the link. But I'm running a batch file that updates my clock from an XP machine on my network. I have disabled this for testing.

[Jim Fricke]

I have a new network card that I hope to install this weekend. If I keep track of my test results well enough, I should be able to determine if my present card or it's drivers are causing the problem.