[ntp:questions] Newbie at NTP

Martin Burnicki martin.burnicki at meinberg.de
Fri Sep 21 07:20:43 UTC 2007


Dummy cerberus wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm new in questions relaetd with NTP, so I've got lost browsing the
> correct answer for my problema around the WWW.
> 
> I have Win2K domain with two DC... I would like my RedHat Enterprise
> Linux servers get synchronized to the PDC through NTP.

Besides the fact that another instance of ntpd seems to be running already
(as already mentioned in other replies) please note the following:

- Opposed to Unix/Linx/*BSD machines, Windows is a lousy timekeeper.

- Unless your PDC has a very recent version of w32time, running w32time on
the PDC will make the PDC just an SNTP server to which real NTP clients
might not synchronize.

- If you would run the Windows port of NTP on your PDC then it would be a
real NTP server. However, domain members might not detect and use it
automatically as their upstream time server.

- I wonder to which upstream server your PDC is synchronizing. You can
configure w32time easily to sync to a real NTP server.

As a conclusion I would say you should make your Linux box the primary time
server, with or without a local refclock (GPS or whatever). Then run
w32time on your PDC and let it synchronize to the Linux box. Domain members
should then automatically sync to the PDC.

Other machines (e.g. Linux clients) on which you have to configure the
upstream time server manually should be configured to synchronize to the
Linux box directly.


Martin
-- 
Martin Burnicki

Meinberg Funkuhren
Bad Pyrmont
Germany




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