Synchronised texture animations

Okay, I'm sure someone's had the same idea before, I've made a large pool, and am using several boxes with water textures to simulate the water. Anyway, basically I was hoping to have it slowly animate, sliding in one direction, however the texture animations in each prim become hopelessly mis-aligned depending on when the load and such.

Anyway, what I'm wondering therefore, is what would be the easiest way to implement texture synchronisation so they are all lined up?

My thoughts are to have the parent prim in the linked set message all the child prims, when this happens they will all set their offsets to zero by zero (ie dead centre) and then begin their animation, hopefully in unison!
Then this would simply be repeated every so-often to make sure any client-side mis-alignment is reset.

Am I along the right lines, or is there an easier way to do this?

I'd say you're along the right lines...it's really a hopeless exercise in futility in my experience...but I'd say you're on the right lines.

you're along the right path, but you need to remember that texture animation, along with llTargetOmega are handled client side only, so if there's any kind of hiccup/delay on the script load from the server, then they will get out of synch. I've been very frustrated myself trying to get the illusion of rotating gears, and I've found it near impossible to do so with anything from a rotating texture to using the llTargetOmega.