[ntp:questions] May sound like a newbe question, but....

Richard B. Gilbert rgilbert88 at comcast.net
Sat Mar 8 13:45:03 UTC 2008


VFikov wrote:
> May sound like a newbe question, but am I wrong or earlier Windows
> clients were syncing with NTP ?
> 
> The problem is simple: A big building, about 350-400 Windows XP PCs,
> and 2 Linux servers not only for NTP, but for it too... Now today, on
> my laptop I had to edit the registry of the XP, so it could sync with
> the NTP. Does some one have an idea, how to skip the registry editing,
> and may be edit the servers configuration ... So I will not have to go
> to every PC and start the reg file I made ...
> 
> Please if someone know how to make the damn Windows sync with the
> NTPs, it would be great.. :)

See the white paper "The Windows Time Service" by Shala Brandolini and 
Darin Green

The document is available from many web sites in either Word format or PDF.

You are still going to have to write a small script to configure and 
start the time service and then execute it on each machine.  Note that 
you are not going to get really "tight" synchronization this way.  All 
the machines should be within a minute or less.  You might get tighter 
synch but you can't count on it.  It was only intended to keep clocks 
close enough together to allow Kerberos authentication to function properly.

If you need agreement to within 500 milliseconds or less, I think that 
ntpd is the only solution.

If you have a Windows "Domain", all members of the domain will get their 
time from the domain controller.  The time will be as correct as the 
clock on the domain controller.  NOTHING guarantees the correctness of 
the time on the domain controller.






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