(deprecated) Microsoft Windows OS (XP/NT/Vista) Forum

I didn't expect a reply until later on.

I'm exhausted but I took a brief look at that page and I think it's better than what I found on TechNet. Many thanks.

Here's a summary of what's happened since I last posted.

The first part of the tutorial was great. Following it step by step I had a time server running on Windows Server 2003 in no time. I let it run for a while to be sure it consistently updated every hour. I had my firewall log attempts to connect to an NTP server and my NTP server synchronized to the external NTP server every hour every time. Perfect!

A few minutes ago I decided to start converting the computers on my LAN to synchronize to my new NTP Server running on a machine called DEVELOPMENT. In fact for the time sever you actually enter the machine name.

I immediately ran into a problem. A fairly common one based on what I found on Google: "The time sample was rejected because: The peer's stratum is less than the host's stratum".

Unfortunately none of those messages dealt with someone running an NTP Server. It was just folks trying to sync the time with time.microsoft.com (or whatever it is) using XP, 2K3 and Vista.

Based on what I was able to glean from those XP threads though I formulated a theory for a workaround.

On my machine, called DESKTOP (I'm so creative when it comes to machine names; it's really quite pathetic, LOL.), I changed the time zone and time and tried to sync manually. Windows threw an expected security warning at me. It's a funny thing about Windows Time. If the time on the machine you're trying to sync is too far off from the time on the NTP Server, Windows will not let the sync take place. Weird, huh? Anyway, again I figured that if I set the time zone and time back to close to what they should be and tried to sync DESKTOP to DEVELOPMENT it would work. It did.

Now I'll wait a day and monitor things from the firewall log on DESKTOP to be sure the synchronizations keep happening every hour.

NTP does a better job of synching time than Windows Time Service - very carefully dealing with drift, avoiding abruptly changing the time (it "slips" it by changing the period of individual ticks), etc.

I chose an hour because that's what I recall the KB article recommending.

I've been monitoring time-related traffic via my firewall logs and so far the entire LAN syncs to the NTP server every single hour and the NTP server makes a request for the time every hour.