[ntp:questions] local vs Windows Server 2003

David Woolley david at ex.djwhome.demon.invalid
Wed May 12 20:55:04 UTC 2010


Adrian Marsh wrote:
> 
> The main windows server is set to clock from time.nist.gov, and I'm 
> fighting to get the linux clients to sync from my internal server. 
> Windows clients seem ok (I know thats done via AD).

w32time needs a lot of tweaking to make it NTP compliant.  I'm not sure 
if all the tweaks are available in the Win2003 version.  It is never as 
good as running the ntpd reference implementation on Windows, and 
running that on Unix or Linux is even better.

time.nist.gov is overloaded and unlikely to have an optimum network path 
to you.

> 
> This was all working last week, except one client who insisted that the 
> offset was off by about 300 seconds. That machine was so bad we've been 
> in touch with Dell to look at the hardware.
> 
> However today, the main server needed a reboot, and since then I can't 
> get any of the linux clients to agree to sync to the main server (no * 
> against the peers listing).

You need to use ntpq rv to find out the status of the server and why it 
is being rejected (use it with the association ids from ntpq assoc). 
However, w32time clients do not reject servers with huge root 
dispersions, resulting from the server being unsynchronised for a long time.

As others have said, you should not have a local clock configured.  It 
should, however, only be used as a last resort.




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