May 21, 2008...2:38 pm
How To Configure Windows Time Service - W32Time
The W32Time service is what manages time synchronization for Active Directory domains. Hosts in your domain look to the PDC emulator for time synchronization. By default, Windows will look to your CMOS clock to get it’s time. My problem was that the CMOS clock was about 10 minutes slow.
So, instead of resetting the internal clock, I wanted to point to an external time source. (tock.usno.navy.mil) I found a great article that takes you through the process step by step.
“If you want to ensure that the clocks on your machines are more accurate in terms of absolute (and not just relative) time, you can sync the PDC Emulator in your forest root domain to one of the reliable time servers available on the Internet. This is a good idea if your company is a large enterprise with sites spanning several countries, or if your organization has two or more forests linked by forest trusts. The procedure for doing this on a PDC Emulator running Windows Server 2003 in the forest root domain is as follows. Open Registry Editor (regedit.exe) and configure the following registry entries:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters\Type
This registry entry determines which peers W32Time will accept synchronization from. Change this REG_SZ value from NT5DS to NTP so the PDC Emulator synchronizes from the list of reliable time servers specified in the NtpServer registry entry described below.
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Config\AnnounceFlags
This registry entry controls whether the local computer is marked as a reliable time server (which is only possible if the previous registry entry is set to NTP as described above). Change this REG_DWORD value from 10 to 5 here.
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters\NtpServer
This registry entry specifies a space-delimited list of stratum 1 time servers from which the local computer can obtain reliable time stamps. The list may consist of one or more DNS names or IP addresses (if DNS names are used then you must append ,0×1 to the end of each DNS name). For example, to synchronize the PDC Emulator in your forest root domain with tock.usno.navy.mil, an open-access SNTP time server run by the United States Naval Observatory, change the value of the NtpServer registry entry from time.windows.com,0×1 to tock.usno.navy.mil,0×1 here. Alternatively, you can specify the IP address of this time server, which is 192.5.41.209 instead.
Now stop and restart the Windows Time service using the following commands:
net stop w32time
net start w32time
It may take an hour or so for the PDC Emulator to fully synchronize with the external time server because of the nature of the polling method W32Time uses. Depending on the latency of your Internet connection, the accuracy of the CMOS clock on your forest root PDC Emulator may be within a second or two of UTC. If you need more accurate time however, you can purchase a hardware time source like an atomic clock and connect it to your PDC emulator.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to wait for time convergence to occur between your stratum 2 time server (your forest root PDC Emulator) and the external stratum 1 time server, you can run the following command on your PDC Emulator:
w32tm /resync /rediscover”
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