Thanks for the help (again) Ed.
If I run into problems I'll wait until you get back and can walk me through it 
again. (Actually I did write the procedurea down but couldn't get it to work)
Now that I think about it more closely I THINK the problem was that I didn't 
make it executable.

On Sunday 26 October 2003 07:32 am, Ed Skinner said:
~ On Thursday 23 October 2003 08:59, Michael Havens wrote:
~ > You know,
~ > Someone helped me to get this going awhile ago but since then I had to
~ > reinstall my system and I didn't bother to write down the procedure (i'm
~ > bothering now). Could someone help me get nist.pl (or another time
 setting ~ > device) going?
~
~ Hi Michael,
~      That would be me. Unfortunately, I'm in Wuhan, (People's Republic of)
~ China for the next two weeks so the telephone conversation we did last time
~ won't be possible. But perhaps with the previous success under your belt,
~ it'll be easier this time?
~      I just converted the settings in nist.pl to work here (where the local
~ time is +8 hours ahead of GMT instead of -7 as in AZ). Here's a brief
 summary ~ of what you'll need to do.
~      1) Edit nist.pl with some text editor such as gedit. Depending on
 which ~ distribution you have, this may be easy or hard to locate. (Editors
 such as ~ Emacs and Vi are notoriously difficult at first. I'd suggest
 avoiding them.) ~      2) Using the editor, open the nist.pl file and locate
 the line that ~ starts with:
~ $timediff = ....
~      3) Change that line so it looks like this:
~ $timediff = '-07:00:00';			# time differance (Arizona)
~      4) Similarly, find the "$timeserver" line and make it look like this:
~ $timeserver = 'time_a.timefreq.bldrdoc.gov';	# time server
~      5) And make the #1 line of the file EXACTLY like this (no spaces!):
~ #!/usr/bin/perl
~      6) Save the changes and exit from the editor.
~      7) Next, you'll need a shell. How you launch a shell may depend on the
~ distribution you are running but, on my Red Hat 8.0 system, I do a
~ *RIGHT*-click in the background and then a *LEFT* click on "New Terminal".
~      8) In that shell, "cd" to the directory where you have the modified
~ nist.pl file.
~      9) Type the following command to make "nist.pl" executable:
~ chmod +x nist.pl
~     10) And, (with your system connected to the network) set the time:
~ ./nist.pl
~
~      If you get stuck or something doesn't work, you might try taking the
~ system to one of the PLUG meetings. The members are all very helpful and
 I'm ~ sure they can help. An added benefit is that, by watching someone do
 "magic" ~ to your system, you can always stop them and ask, "why did you do
 that?" ~ Always a VERY good thing to do!
~      Zaijian!
~

-- 
<:-)~MIKE~(-:>