Resync NTP time to local DC

A client of mine was having an issue because originally within their server build, they were hard coding the NTP server into the registry.  Well that NTP server has now gone away and they wanted to use Active Directories model of using the DC within their site configuration to pull the time from.  Here is a script I used to stop w32time service, reregister w32tm, start w32time service and resync with AD.  This worked great and the client was happy.

net stop w32time
w32tm /unregister
w32tm /register
net start w32time
w32tm /resync

NTP Commands

This command will allow you to determine who supplying your client/server with its time. 

W32tm /query /source

This command will show you the time difference between the client you are on and another machine.  Set target to your remote machine.

w32tm /stripchart /computer:target /samples:n/dataonly

This will configure the PDC emulator with a new time source or list of time sources, called a peer list.  If you have multiple peers, use a space delimited list.

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

Here is a real world example of how you would reconfigure your PDC emulator.

w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:time.windows.com /syncfromflags:manual /reliable:yes /update

Virtualized NTP DC with Incorrect Time

So we were having an issue with all of our machines having a time that was lagging minutes behind and I had our PDC emulator DC configured as the NTP.  There wasn’t a firewall blocking connection to the external time source and resetting the DC’s clock to the correct time was only temporarily fixing the issue.

I found this article that explains why the DC’s time would never self heal as the Integrated Services would force the VM to pull the Time Synchronization from the Hyper-V host during a reboot.  To disable this, use the Hyper-V manager and uncheck Time Synchronization with Integrated Servers.

Not only is this an informative article, the author has a mouth like a sailor, I dig it.

http://www.aperture.ro/index.php/2009/01/windows-time-sync-hyper-v-enabled-domain-controller-dilemma/