Time zone Mismatch Error

Hubstaff is built to work with your user’s real time zone. We recommend that users use NTP (network time protocol) to sync their time to a time server (all OSes offer this)

When a user’s operating system clock is not correct, Hubstaff will display an error telling them that the time on their operating system is off by a certain number of minutes and/or hours which Hubstaff calculates.

Hubstaff can calculate this time mismatch because the server knows the correct UTC time and it knows the end user’s time offset (timezone) so it knows if the clock off by more than +/- 2 mins. If the clock off by more than 2 minutes, Hubstaff will not allow the user to record activity. Once the user’s computer is set to the correct time, Hubstaff will track without problems.

The way the check works is, that we send up a time stamp in GMT ( which is based on the users configured TZ / DST info) if that time is off from the servers view of GMT by more than some margin (+/- 120 seconds) then we send back the “clock off” error to the desktop client.

The way you can verify your time zone is correct is by going to one of the global clock sites and checking that the time the website says that your time zone should be is the time you have your computer’s clock set to and that your timezone is matching the time zone you chose to look at.

In order to adjust the time on a windows machine, please see these guides:

Windows 8 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gdHAvISbrk

Windows 7 and Vista – http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Set-the-clock

Windows XP – https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/time-synchronization-windows-xp

In order to adjust the time on a Mac, please see this guide:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA20376

Windows

We recommend that you always let the computer adjust your time to sync with the internet.  You can do this on windows by setting your “internet time” settings to synchronize the time automatically.

On Windows 10, click the clock on the desktop > click additional date,time, and regional settings> set the time and date> Internet time> Change setting> synchronize with internet time> server time.windows.com. > update now> Ok

OS X

Step 1

Click on the System Settings icon.

osx system settings

Step 2

Navigate to General > Date & time.

osx system settings general date and time

Step 3

Choose to set your time and date automatically and choose your current region.

osx set date and time automatically

Step 4

Choose your current Time Zone or choose to set the Time Zone automatically using your current location.

osx set time zone location

Linux

Step 1

Click on the clock in the upper right-hand corner. Then click on “Time & Date settings”.

Step 2

Select your current location on the map, then make sure the time is set “Automatically from the Internet”.

The desktop client only “works” in UTC under the hood.. So it asks for the raw time from the OS and not the adjusted” time due to Timezone configuration.   When the client sends any data to the server it sends all time in UTC..   Now if your users are switching timezones and the clock ends up being incorrect, (e.g. you set it to Pacific but the clock is off by 8 hours) then things will break and our servers will reject the data as it’s off from what it should be.  Basically if you have server time sync enabled on your desktop things should work fine no matter what timezone your computer is set to.   so there is no “time zone restriction” at all.  Only that the computer clock is set to the correct time with in +/- 2 minutes.
When moving locations, OSX operating system will correct/sync the time zone almost instantly. Windows may take days, and Linux is somewhere in between.

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