Time windows domain

This is primarily important for Kerberos authentication to work. Windows constantly synchronizes the time with the NTP servers. First of all, make sure this service is running:.

You can check with which NTP server NTP source your computer is currently synchronizing the time by using the command:. In an AD domain, you can list the domain controllers with which time synchronization can be performed:.

If it's unable to contact the target NTP server, you'll see error codes instead. If that happens, you may have network issues, such as a firewall, preventing communication with the NTP server. You would run this command after making other changes to see if the issues are resolved.

If the time service is simply not behaving, you can use these commands to completely re-register the service. Note that this will remove all configuration related to Windows Time and restore it to default: Net Stop W32time W32tm. The log will contain an entry for each operation that the service performs. It can be difficult to sort through all of the information, but it can be extremely valuable to see each step in detail.

If a single member server is wrong, review the System event log to determine which DCs it is trying to sync from, and ensure those DCs are working correctly. Sometimes, a failure will cascade through the domain. A networking issue may prevent a set of DCs from syncing with the PDC, which can then cause the member servers in that network to stop as well.

You may need to trace the issues up the hierarchy. Share this article. Mitchell Grande Systems Engineer. OK, so I'm told that Windows is "supposed" to automatically find the timezone at install. I've had that happen exactly once. I've given up trying to figure out the magic to make that happen.

Use GPOs by site if you span multiple time zones. The w32tm command manages the w32time service. Because some dev at Microsoft said so, that's why. This command says to configure the time service to use a manual list of peers NTP servers , to use a manual source that we just gave it , to mark itself as "reliable", meaning that it can serve time to others, and to inform the service that the configuration has changed.

I don't know why one would want to update the config but not use the changes However, when setting up the PDC or fixing time issues, I'd rather wait for the call to complete, and then, i restart the service. But wait, you say, that "shouldn't" be necessary. And you're not wrong. It "shouldn't". I've been doing this IT thing for over 30 years. I restart the service. Configuring the domain members is even easier. Instead of using a manual list of peers, we don't even tell them to use the DC by name.

We use the "domhier" flag to sync to the domain hierarchy. This means that if the PDC changes, all is well. I use the exact same script that I do for a domain controller, including the external sources. However, you could, instead, point them to your PDC. This is a really annoying gotcha. Independent of all this goodness, Hyper-V will attempt to synchronize the Host and the Guests, blissfully ignoring all the hard work you've just done.

In theory, this is a good idea. In practice, I'd rather have my domain members behaving like domain members, and my non-domain members being independent. In the worst case, the two types of synchronization start fighting with each other and Really Bad Things happen to your Windows time-keeping as the clock changes constantly.

I choose to disable it via the registry in almost all of my guest VMs, and I also generally de-select it in the Hyper-V integration settings you know, belt and suspenders. If you choose to allow the Integration components to sync the Guest Time, you must make sure that the Hyper-V server is properly sync'd to the domain or an external source.

I use a script for domain members I'm outnumbered. In fact, I'm been known to put such a script in a GPO as a startup script on the server OU to make reasonably sure that time settings never get messed up again!

But where, oh where, could one ever find such a script? When I learned about computer time in computer networks, Microsoft Windows didn't exist. When I used and configured my first networks with Windows time service, that service wasn't compliant to NTP.

That service was using SNTP at that time. That included the implementations up to Windows and Windows XP and claimed accuracy within 5 minutes. Your URL to Wikipedia is outdated.