Windows time Service

[bobbiedigital]

What is the effect of stopping and restarting the windows time service?, will it resync a Primary domain controller and server? or would it be better to use nettime and sync with an external time server? Ive done some research onthis and it talks about restarting this service in the same context as setting an external time source to resync the PDC and server, but it doesnt say how.

Any help will be appreciated.
Cheers
Bobbie

 

[bcastner]

For all clients, DCs, and servers except the authorative time server:

. Starting and stopping W32time will resysnch the computer on which the command is run. (except for Win NT based PDCs, where the settings are .ini based and not registry based as in Win2k, XP and Win2003. W32time -update is required as a statement between stopping and starting the time service.)

. net time domain /set will do a resynchronization

. W32tm -once will do a resynchronization

. W32tm -s will do a resynchronization

Any changes to the time server in Win2k will require a stop and restart of the time service so that the registry values are re-read. This will also resynchronize the authoratiative time server. In a complex Domain it is recomended that the FSMO primary domain controller emulator serving as authoratative time source be rebooted after configuration changes to the W32time service. For XP and Windows 2003 enhancements to the W32tm command avoid this:

w32tm /resync [/computer:<computer>] [/nowait] [/rediscover] [/soft]
Tell a computer that it should resynchronize its clock as soon as possible, throwing out all accumulated error statistics.
computer:<computer> - computer that should resync. If not
specified, the local computer will resync.
nowait - do not wait for the resync to occur;
return immediately. Otherwise, wait for the resync to
complete before returning.
rediscover - redetect the network configuration and rediscover network sources, then resynchronize.
soft - resync utilizing existing error statistics. Not useful, provided for compatibility.

 

[bobbiedigital]

does w32tm use the windows time server?

eg time.windows.com, 0x1 ?

would that be the same as using an external time source?

cheers
bobbie

 

[bcastner]

W32tm uses whatever was specified for the W32time service on what it views as a reliable w32time provider. In a heirarchical domain the clients, servers and DCs could well view different computers as the time server.

This can be an external time resource:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;216734

This explanation and the diagrams inside can help a great deal I hope:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/docs/wintimeserv.doc

 

[bobbiedigital]

Thanks for that!

Those documents are very useful, I really appreciate the help.

Bobbie