EightBells Fleet Time Manager features

EightBells Fleet Time Manager is a Windows console for the computers in a ship’s Active Directory domain. It runs on one administration PC and reaches every other PC through WinRM, with no agent on the targets.

Discovery and scan

Every PC in the domain, checked in seconds

• Load from Active Directory: all enabled computer accounts. Names matching NAS, PRINTER, SWITCH, ROUTER, -AP-, UPS- or CAMERA are skipped. Hosts can also be added by hand.
• Scan All / Scan Selected / Re-scan flagged: ping with TCP 445, 3389 and 80 fallback, WinRM test, then timezone ID, UTC time, w32tm status, OS and uptime, in parallel.
• Heartbeat Monitor: pings every 10 seconds and warns when a PC drops offline. Auto-scan repeats the full scan at an interval.
• Live filter by name, show or hide offline PCs, sort by any column, double-click a PC for every detail.

The reference time is set in Settings: this PC, an NTP server, or a value you type.

Timezone

Fleet-wide, now or on schedule

• Maritime list: fixed-offset zones with no daylight saving, recommended on board. Political list: every Windows zone, including DST zones.
• Set TZ > Selected and Set TZ > All online, applied with tzutil on each PC, effective immediately.
• Scheduler: timezone changes at a date and time, for all online PCs, the selection or a typed list of names. Jobs run while EightBells is open; a badge in the top bar counts the pending ones.

NTP and clock

Repair the clocks that do not synchronise

A fix counts as successful only when w32tm actually received time from the source. If it reports that no time data was available, the PC cannot reach its source; on a ship that usually means UDP 123 to the internet is blocked, and the domain controller should use the ship’s GPS/NTP source instead.

Remote management

Nine modules, each with its own computer selector

Software inventory

Silent uninstall, in the right order

• Read from the HKLM 64-bit, HKLM 32-bit and HKCU uninstall keys. Win32_Product is deliberately not used, because it can trigger MSI repairs.
• Uninstall order: QuietUninstallString, msiexec /x for MSI packages, the EXE uninstaller with the common silent switches, the original command, then WMI. Exit codes 0 and 3010 (reboot pending) count as success.
• Entries without an uninstall string: MSI product code, Uninstall-Package, Win32_Product, then AppX removal. Force purge removes the folder and the registry entry of leftovers.
• Push Install / Update from a UNC share to C:\Windows\Temp on each PC, run silently, removed afterwards.

Undo and audit

Every change, with the state before it

• Timezone, time source, services, Remote Desktop and registry changes are recorded with the previous state of each PC and can be undone: the last one with Ctrl+Z, or any selected entry.
• Uninstall, purge, restart, shutdown, log off and end process are listed in grey for the audit trail.
• Every action asks for confirmation with the list of target PCs, and is written to the session log file.
• Export JSON with the full scan results, or an HTML fleet report that opens in the browser.

Licence and updates

Offline activation, update check you can ignore

• 24-hour demo with every function on first start, then a key bound to the hardware fingerprint of the admin PC. FULL keys have an expiry date, PERMANENT keys do not. The key is pasted or loaded from a .lic file and activated offline.
• If the licence ends while EightBells is running it switches to read-only: scanning and reading continue, changes are blocked. Setting the system clock back is detected.
• A few seconds after start EightBells checks antennapilot.com for a newer version and only tells you; it never downloads or installs anything by itself.

Requirements

What you need