Setup NTP on Windows 2003 DC

This is quite easy but I always end up looking at the web to find out how, so I just made this short note of it here.

Every Domain Controller in a Windows AD need to have a reliable timesource, and personally I like to use "ntp.uio.no", its proven stable over the years. So whenever I setup a new domain controller, I like to setup NTP on it to ensure everything runs smoothly.

Follow the link to this article to get the walkthrough for it.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816042

Make sure your PDC emulator has this set as timesource, and if you dont want to set it up on the other DC's, make sure they use the main as internal source.

Using NTP on ESX hosts

Different people and different sites maintain their time-issues in different ways. Personally I like to setup a NTP connection towards the internet, most ofte to ntp.uio.no, to keep my core systems synced, and then let clients get their time from the AD. However, with ESX hosts thats not as easy, they cant sync through AD (without more setup), so I just run normal NTP setup on them.

The following article shows the full walkthrough on how to set it up, also by using vmware's own NTP servers.

http://tinyurl.com/vmware-ntpsetup

To make sure it works, just run the watch command and see how it goes a while after its setup.