Change Time Sync Freqeuncy

[Moebius01]

I have a 5 server Web farm in our company's DMZ, and a couple of the servers seem to have issues keeping time. Our security folks won't let me have NTP access out, but did open a port in to the NTP server on one of our routers so I configured to hit that.

The only problem is, the Win2k3 utility seems to only want to update once per week. Is there a way to change this to a more frequent update, like daily?

 

[MJanssen01]

Hi,

I assume that the w2k3 utility you use is the built-in time service (w32time) that comes with w2k3. By default w32time should update once every 8 hours. Here's a link on how you can configure w32time.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;223184

Hope this helps.

regards,
MJanssen

 

[Moebius01]

Have you tried this on 2k3 by any chance? I had come across this one, but the registry values are completely different now it seems. I found a similar doc on 2k3, but so I'm not positive which setting handle the frequency and so far changes haven't worked.

 

[MJanssen01]

Hi,

Sorry my mistake i copied the wrong link.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pr.../technologies/security/ws03mngd/26_s3wts.mspx

That's the link i wanted to copy into the post. This is probably the same link you found. If you look at the 2nd table in the article you'll find the following entries.

NtpServer <Router address>
Type <NTP>
SpecialPollInterval <time interval in seconds>

These are the entries you have to change in order to make it work (providing you configure the time service manually instead through GPO)

Don't forget to stop and start the time service and check the eventlog for w32time events. You can first try it with a small time interval to save time.

Hope this helps.
Regards,
MJanssen

 

[mlichstein]

You don't need to stop and start w32time on 2003. Just run w32tm /config /update when you make changes.

 

[Moebius01]

That's the MS article I had found, but never could find the corresponding keys in the registry until today. They have the listings from the Group Policy (which I don't have access too...don't ask) as corresponding to the \w32time\parameters section, but on my systems at least those settings are under the \TimeProviders\NTPClient section. In my foolishness, I trusted the MS article so I didn't just search for the key in question.

 

[mlichstein]

They should be under HKLM\System\CCS\services\w32time\parameters. The article is correct.

You can run w32tm /dumpreg /subkeyarameters to view them.

It also seems like you are trying to treat the symptom and not the actual problem. If your servers are frequently getting out of sync with time, you should be looking at things like CMOS batteries and so on.

 

[Moebius01]

Strange, but where I listed was where they were for all 5 Web servers. Changing it there worked and they're updating properly now. I'd love to hear any guesses as to why it's in a different key on these systems.

As for the problem, that's in part because I'm 1200 miles away from the servers and the folks at the data center I wouldn't trust to do it. Plus, with the exception of 1 of the servers which is a couple years older, I think the problem was actually with the NTP server. As our security folks would let my servers (which are in the DMZ to begin with) go out to the internet for time sync, they decided to set up NTP on one of the internal routers and I point to that. I think it may be the source of the problem instead as they started going faster out of time after I started hitting it.