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August 30, 2008 04:45am pdt
 
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Attachment Details

Change W32Time NTP time providers in SBS 2003?

Tags: 2003, ntp, time, sbs, w32time
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server R2

How do I change the W32Time, NTP and/or Windows Time (are these all the same?) time providers used by SBS 2003?

I occasionally see the following error:

----------------------------------------------
Event Type:      Error
Event Source:      W32Time
Event Category:      None
Event ID:      29
Date:            8/3/2007
Time:            2:18:12 PM
User:            N/A
Computer:      SERVER
Description:
The time provider NtpClient is configured to acquire time from one or more time sources, however none of the sources are currently accessible.  No attempt to contact a source will be made for 15 minutes. NtpClient has no source of accurate time.
-----------------------------------------------

and I want to use time-a.nist.gov instead of time.windows.com

Thanks,
Dan
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Question Stats
Zone: OS
Question Asked By: HighTechGeek
Solution Provided By: olafdc
Participating Experts: 4
Solution Grade: A
Views: 228
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[+][-]Accepted Solution by olafdc

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[+][-]Assisted Solution by DanKoster

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Comment by babaganoosh
do any ports need to be opened for this to work?  I keep getting time data is not available when running the script.

I have a linksys firewall and sbs 2003 R2 standard.
 
 
Comment by olafdc
123 UDP,
Olaf
 
 
Comment by babaganoosh
it seems I was using time.nist.gov and getting the error messsage.  changing that to time-a.nit.gov got it working without the fiirewall being opened?!  Sound right?  I know that's the port that time uses.. but does it need to be open?  when I opened the port on the router and sbs, it still didn't work.  I closed them and then used time-a and that worked!
 
 
Comment by DanKoster
Most firewalls don't block any kind of outbound connection, including every Linksys I know of.  So there are no firewall changes needed.  If you were running ISA or some other firewall with outbound filtering, then you would need to make sure that 123 UDP was allowed.  
 
 
Comment by babaganoosh
What's your thoughts about time.nist.gov not working vs. time-a.nist.gov?  We're here in NJ.  if it has to go through too many routers / delays, the reply dies? (is time on the west coast?)
 
 
Comment by DanKoster
Here's a list of government run time servers:

http://tf.nist.gov/service/time-servers.html

Time-a and time-b are closer to you anyway.  Can't speak to why too many hops kills the effort, but I've been happy using the north america pool from ntp.org.  It relies on secondary servers and rotates to a different server every time you query, so you aren't overloading a single server with all your queries.  
 
 
Comment by babaganoosh
"I've been happy using the north america pool from ntp.org.  "

how do you set that up?
 
 
Comment by DanKoster
See my original post.  When you use north-america.pool.ntp.org as the server address, you will get a different time server (in North America) whenever the DNS lookup occurs.  Read ntp.org for more info.
 
 
Comment by babaganoosh
thanks!
 
 
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