[ntp:questions] Time of by 4 min
Martin Burnicki
martin.burnicki at meinberg.de
Fri Mar 14 08:59:09 UTC 2014
David Taylor wrote:
> On 13/03/2014 17:48, greg.wayne.smith at gmail.com wrote:
>> That's a pretty slick program just from looking at the page. I will
>> play around with in and see. I tend to not install any 3rd party apps
>> on my DC's though.
>>
>> I did mine the old fashion way by just setting the registry settings.
>> Basically this for Windows servers: http://www.pool.ntp.org/en/use.html
>>
>> I have never had any issues till about 3 weeks ago.
>> My server is not slowing losing time... It's a solid 4 min off for the
>> past 3 weeks.
>
> Some versions of the Windows Time Service are broken - e.g. they get a
> time update once a week. I strongly recommend using NTP from the
> Meinberg install set and updating to the latest development version,
> especially on your DCs.
As far as I know the default time update interval depends on the Windows
installations.
For standalone machines the default w32time configuration is to poll
time.windows.com once per week, but if the machine is installed as
member of an Active Directory domain the default for clients and
secondary servers is to figure out the authoritative time source for the
domain via the directory, and poll this one more frequently.
Again, AFAIK, one of the domain controllers running w32time registers
itself as authoritative time source for the domain, so the clients can
automatically detect it. I'm not sure, however, how often this top-level
w32time polls some upstream NTP source by default.
Ntpd is unable to register itself as authoritative time source for the
domain, so if you replace w32time on the DC by ntpd then clients and
secondary servers won't synchronize automatically anymore, so you had to
configure each individual client and tell it where to get its time from.
So if you want to have an own NTP server for your network my advice is
to set up an extra machine running ntpd e.g. with a GPS time source, and
then just point the DC to this machine.
> [Caveats: I haven't used the Windows Time Service for many years, and I
> believe it is a little better now, and I don't run a domain.]
I'm not running a domain, either, but what I've written above is the
conclusion from discussions here on the list and with our customers.
Martin
--
Martin Burnicki
Meinberg Funkuhren
Bad Pyrmont
Germany
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