Time, I don’t need no stinking time!!

You won’t here Windows saying that, Microsoft relies on time for Active Directory to work correctly so if you start to drift you will see access errors. Have you seen the following eventlog in your system logs resently?

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 60 minutes. NtpClient has no source of accurate time.

 

 Or maybe this one?

Time Provider NtpClient: No valid response has been received from manually configured peer time.windows.com after 8 attempts to contact it. This peer will be discarded as a time source and NtpClient will attempt to discover a new peer with this DNS name.

 

 This is a sure sign that your having issues getting and setting time correctly. By default the setting for w32tm is to get it’s time from time.windows.com. There are many  people out there having trouble getting time from that source since the DST change. So how do you fix it?  You can use the w32tm /config options to change the time server you are using. This will then allow Windows to get time from a more reliable source.

In a DOS shell run the following lines.

w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:pool.ntp.org,0x8 /syncfromflags:MANUAL
net stop w32time
net start w32time
w32tm /resync

This will set the new time server as pool.ntp.org and then force a resync of the time across the domain.

Enjoy

Cubert