1

Good afternoon,

All of the newer W10 clients in my domain are automatically using a domain controller to sync time with. How can i enable this for older computers in my domain that are trying to reach out to Windows time? I want them to use whatever DC they are connecting to.

Thank you,

Chris

11 Spice ups
2

A domain joined PC should already do this. If it’s not then someone has changed some settings.

What older versions of Windows are we talking about here?

This should help you.

You can do all of the work with GPOs.

6 Spice ups
3

Be sure that NTP server service is running on your DC.

You can set up GPO (Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Windows Time Service - Enable NTP server) and assign ot to DC to be sure it’s always as NTP server ( more here ).

Just be sure that your DC is sync with some external NTP server.

Good article about that is here - https://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/65413-configure-dc-to-synchronize-time-with-external-ntp-server

1 Spice up
4

Echoing this ^. All your devices in your production sync their time with DC which holds PDCe FSMO role.

5

Might be worth checking your DHCP scope to ensure it is pointing to the right NTP service.

6

You shouldn’t need to mess with NTP, GPO’s or anything. Domain joined computers will sync to your DC’s automagically and the DC’s themselves sync to the one holding the PDCe role. This is all built-in and you shouldn’t need to do anything unless someone messed with the default settings.

1 Spice up
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That’s my exact thought. It’s not working as it should because someone f**ked about with it in the past.

1 Spice up
8

Thank you. Yes someone must have messed with the settings at some point. Do you know of a way to get it back to syncing to the DC? Our agencies span across multiple counties with a lot of secondary DCs.

9

The link from my first post tells you how to do this.

1 Spice up
10

Just follow any of the guides mentioned above, and you will get things working properly again. Here is another (pretty simple) one https://www.hyper-v.io/configuring-time-synchronization-for-all-computers-in-a-windows-domain/ just in case.