I upgraded my domain controllers to Windows Server 2008 and am now in the process of decommissioning the old servers. Since moving the FSMO roles over to the new server, the new server started warning me that the time source was not set on this machine. Okay, I know in Windows Server 2003 I had to make some registry settings, but surely to goodness Microsoft has since corrected this in Windows Server 2008.

I hit the Internet and did a search and found a good source on Microsoft Technet on this very topic.

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/92a73b00-12b7-49d0-b6be-007e626f387d1033.mspx?mfr=true

If you transfer or seize the PDC emulator role to another server, you will need to repeat this on the machine you move the PDC Emulator role to. Here are the steps that I performed on the server holding the PDC emulator role.

1. At the elevated command prompt enter the command: w32tm /stripchart /computer:time.nrc.ca /samples:3 /dataonly 
2. Ensure that UDP traffic on Port 123 is allowed through the firewall. 
3. At the elevated command prompt enter the command: w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:time.nrc.ca /syncfromflags:manual /reliable:yes /update

 

What this does is set my PDC emulator to use the Canadian National Research Council’s NTP server which is a stratum-2 server. For a list of public NTP servers you can use, the NTP Public Services Project has a good list of public NTP servers.