Ros on two machines, different time stamps

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@gvdhoorn This is the scenario: I got two LiDARs on two different machines, each machine runs its own ROS Kinetic on Ubuntu 16.04. So on each machine I recorded rosbag including /points_raw topic. The time stamp you see above is for when I play those two rosbag files on a third machine and echo /points_raw. Since those two bag files have been recorded for the same duration of time, I expected to get close enough time stamps and under the same format, so that I can sync two topics.

I checked /use_sim_time param, it was not configured at all. So I issued roscore command, then set /use_sim_time to false and then fired up my sensor again. I checked the time stamp of the generated topic, still the short one which is sim_time. How can I eliminate this time format ?

ros::Time() gets its clock from the system clock, unless use_sim_time is set to true. The first thing I would check is whether Machine 1 has a properly functioning system clock. Is it an embedded platform? Some other special clock configuration (ie: external, GPS synced, battery backed RTC, etc)?

What is the output of lsb_release -a and uname -rmvp on Machine 1 and Machine 2?