[ntp:questions] Re: Peer to Peer

Mark St Laurent stormrunner'_removethis' at comcast.net
Mon Sep 26 16:22:52 UTC 2005


My authoritative server would be my ciso router that does sync with stratum 
2 time source then broadcasts to the LAN. I also found this post entitled 
"problems with w32time" followed the instructions and it seemed to work.

The Time service is not configured to use a reliable source for 
synchronization.

>From a newsgroup post:

1. Stop the windows time service: open a command prompt and type "net stop 
w32time".

2. Configure the machine to sync with an outside time source: type "net time 
/setsntp:192.53.103.103"; this will set the machine to automatically sync 
with one of the time servers

3. To confirm this works type "w32tm -once -test -v" this will test 
synchronization against the time server and display verbose output.

4. Sync with the time server: "w32tm -s"; if you get a response that looks 
something like "RPC to local server returned 0x6b5", then it worked, but if 
you get "RPC to local server returned 0x0" then it did not, which usually 
happens if you run the command while the w32time service is running.

5. Start the w32time service: "net start w32time". Once you start the 
service, the clock should automatically sync with the navy time server. You 
should not have to worry about any other domain machines, as they should 
automatically sync their clocks with the pdc emulator.

The part that concerns me is that " You should not have to worry about any 
other domain machines, as they should automatically sync their clocks with 
the pdc emulator." It would seem that I have created a PDC emulator which I 
believe would also broadcast time. Not to mention the other machines not on 
domain still will not sync.I will probably scan network with packet sniffer 
to see if this is true. The above instructions do actually sync the time but 
I think that the "w32tm -s" command accomplished that. Im not sure if "net 
start w32time" will continue the updates, at any rate I modified Windows 
Time Service for automatic startup.

Possabily what I have done is correct and just needs to be repeated on all 
machine where time sync is critical. Or I need to create batch file useing 
w32tm -s to run periodically if the time service does not function on peer 
to peer. I have trouble believing that windows peer configured machines have 
no native way to sync with NTP broadcasts. Also I see additional post 
mentioning free client obviously third party implementation what is the 
concensus on most used NTP Client for this and how would it be preferable to 
what was discussed previously.

"David Woolley" <david at djwhome.demon.co.uk> wrote in message 
news:T1127686929 at djwhome.demon.co.uk...
> in article <jZBZe.2185$KQ5.766 at newssvr12.news.prodigy.com>,
> Mark St Laurent <stormrunner'_removethis'@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> I need advise on how to set up NTP for windows clients that do not
>> authenticate to a Primary Domain Controller. My Cisco router is set to
>> update via NTP and broadcasts to the LAN. When I set net time /setsntp:
>
> setsntp does not use NTP it uses a Microsoft broken implementation of
> SNTP; you should either get support for this from Microsoft, or install
> the proper (free) implementation of NTP for NT.
>
> Note that W32Time doesn't support acting as a broadcast client.
>
>> (routeraddress) nothing happens. I read some articles on Microsoft's web
>> site but these seem to create "Authoratative Servers" . I dont think I 
>> want
>> to be creating a bunch of these just to keep time synced.
>
> You will need the routers to be synchronised to an authorative server
> in the sense that they are traceable to a hardware UTC time source,
> before they will serve time as valid.  However, your problem may be that
> w32time makes requests in the wrong mode.  Also, I wouldn't be surprised
> if w32time used times that were marked as invalid.
>
>> Subject: Peer to Peer
>
> Although one of the bugs in W32Time is that it makes peer, rather than
> server requests, it actually needs to be operated in a client server
> configuration, so the subject doesn't make sense.
>
> Note that NTP does not form a consensus amongst peers; it requires
> the presence of reference clocks that are, externally, synchronised to
> true UTC time.  If you want a consensus time, you will need to use
> the timed protocol (although I know of no Windows implementations).
>
> Also, I vaguely remember that some versions of W32Time were nobbled
> to prevent workstations using it except as subordinates to a domain
> controller. 





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