Recently I was working on a windows 2008 Domain controller, where everything was looking fine even the DCdiag was clean. There were some intermittent DNS not working issues reported for which I was digging around. Thats when I saw that the clock was off by 3 mins or so, though that shouldn’t cause any issue as permissible limit with Kerberos is 5 mins but still I decided to fix that.
We executed the following command to force sync the time but got the following error
w32tm /resync /rediscover
We also found the following events logged on the server
Event ID 12 Logged in Event Viewer
Event ID 144 The time service has stopped advertising as good time source
We check the registry for external time source under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters\ NTPServer and found it pointing toward time.windows.com.
Windows time registry keys
Through when we tried querying the time source using cmdline switch w32tm /query /source we got the source as Local CMOS Clock
Query Time Source reveals Local CMOS Clock
w32tm /query /peers returns
#Peers: 1
Peer:
State: Pending
Time Remaining: 549.2477392s
Mode: 0 (reserved)
Stratum: 0 (unspecified)
PeerPoll Interval: 0 (unspecified)
HostPoll Interval: 0 (unspecified)
We executed the following steps to reconfigure windows time service on the Windows 2008 R2 Domain controller and that fixed our time issue.
w32tm /unregister :This steps unregister’s windows time service from the server, it even deletes the registry entries for windows time service
w32tm /register : This reregisters the windows time service on the server
Following is a critical step as it reconfigure all the windows time settings on the server, you may change the time sources (Peerlist) per your preference but it most cases this should work fine
w32tm.exe /config /update : This steps updates the changes on the server
Restart-Service w32time : It is customary to restart windows time service after so many changes, hence do the honour 🙂 .
This fixed our issue and Hopefully will help you too, feel free to report any new issue you need help with at our forum
This article also has good information about windows time
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