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Eric Z Beard
Asked: 2009-05-03 17:33:22 +0800 CST

How do I configure a windows domain controller to use an external time server?

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I found this KB artice: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816042

But it involves a bunch of manual registry hacks. I was hoping to find something buried in Administrative Tools somewhere that allowed me to do this.

I'm using Windows Server 2003.

windows w32time

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    A Windows 2003 server which is a dc and has the pdc role will be set by default to syncronise it's time with time.microsoft.com. If you wish to use a different sntp time server you can issue this command at the command promt

    net time /setsntp:FQDN

    where FQDN is replaced by the time server name. It may take several minutes for this to take effect.

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  2. This needs to be done on the DC with the PDC emulator role

    To configure the Windows Time service on the PDC emulator

      Type the following command to configure the PDC emulator and then press ENTER:

  w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:peers /syncfromflags:manual /reliable:yes /update

  where peers specifies the list of DNS names and/or IP addresses of the NTP time source that the PDC emulator synchronizes from. For example, you can specify time.windows.com. When specifying multiple peers, use a space as the delimiter and enclose them in quotation marks.

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc786897.aspx

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  3. I would have thought configuring it via the normal method would work?

    1. Double click the clock
    2. Internet Time tab
    3. Enter the servers and hit update, I'm for example using 0.pool.uk.ntp.org which I've always assumed propagated to the domain clients.
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