Maintaining accurate time on your server is critical largely because many services and IT applications rely on accurate time settings to function as expected. These include logging services, monitoring and auditing applications, and database replication to mention a few.

Time skew in servers, and any client systems for that matter, is undesirable and usually causes conflict in time-critical applications.  To maintain accurate time settings on your server and across the network by extension, it’s preferred to install and enable a NTP server on your server.

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    What is an NTP server?

    NTP, short for Network Time Protocol, is a protocol that synchronizes time across network devices. It listens on UDP port 123 and always ensures that time inconsistencies across the server and client systems are mitigated and that client systems are always in sync with the server.

    NTP server refers to a network device or a service that fetches time from an external time source and syncs the time across the network using the NTP protocol. This guide will focus on installing NTP service on Windows server 2019.

    How Does NTP Work ?

    Being a protocol, NTP requires a client-server architecture. The NTP client residing on a Windows PC, for example, initiates a time request exchange with the NTP server.

    A time-stamp data exchange happens between the server and client and this helps in adjusting the clock on client’s systems to the highest degree of accuracy to match the time on the NTP server. In this guide, we will walk you through the installation and configuration of NTP server on Windows Server 2019.

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    There are several ways of setting up NTP server and we will look at each in turn.

    Install NTP Server on Windows Server 2019 using Windows PowerShell

    In Windows Server environments, there is a special Windows time service that handles time synchronization between the server and the client systems. This is known as Windows Time service. PowerShell provides a command-line tool known as w32tm.exe and comes included in all versions of Windows from Windows XP and Windows Server 2008 to the latest versions of each OS.

    Using the w32tm.exe utility, you can configure your Windows system to sync with online time servers. Usually, this is the tool of choice when setting up and monitoring time on your Windows Server system.

    Using the command-line utility is quite straightforward.

    For example, to set the Server to point to 2 different time servers, namely 0.us.pool.ntp.org  and  1.us.pool.ntp.org , launch  PowerShell as the Administrator and  run the command below

    w32tm /config /syncfromflags:manual /manualpeerlist:”0.us.pool.ntp.org 1.us.pool.ntp.org” /update

    Then restart Windows Time service using the commands:

    Stop-Service w32time
    Start-Service w32time

    Here’s a snippet of the commands.

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    You can thereafter confirm the values of NTP servers configured in the registry by running this command:

    w32tm /dumpreg /subkey:parameters

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    Configure NTP Server on Windows Server 2019 using Registry editor

    The second method of installing and configuring the NTP server is using the registry editor. If you are not a fan of the Windows PowerShell, then this will truly come in handy.

    To get started, open the registry editor. Press ‘Windows key + R’ and type ‘regedit’ and hit ENTER. The windows registry will be launched as shown below.

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    Next, head over to the path shown below

    Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpServer

    On the right pane. Be sure to find & double-click the file labelled ‘Enabled’ in the diagram shown below.

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    Next, In the ‘value data’ text field, set the value to ‘1’ and click the ‘Ok’ button.

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    Next, head over to the path:

    Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Config

    In the right pane, double click the ‘Announce Flags’ file.

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    Double-click the file and in the Value data text field, type the value ‘5’ and click ‘OK’.

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    For the changes to come into effect, you need to reboot the NTP server by heading to the services Window. To achieve this, press ‘Windows key + R’ and type ‘services.msc’. Scroll and find ‘Windows Time’, right-click on it and select the ‘Restart’ option.

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    Useful w32tm commands

    Once you have set up your NTP server, you can use the following commands to verify various aspects of the server:

    To check the status of the NTP server, run the command:

    w32tm /query /status

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    To reveal the current NTP pool being used to sync time with execute:

    w32tm /query /source

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    You can also display a list of NTP time servers along with their configuration status as shown.

    w32tm /query /peers

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    To display NTP server configuration settings, run the command:

    w32tm /query /source

    This shows quite a wealth of information.

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    Final Take

    We cannot stress enough how important it is to maintain accurate time and date settings on your server. As you have seen, setting up an NTP server on your Windows server instance is quite easy and straight forward.

    Once you have configured the NTP service on your server, other domain controllers in your environment will sync with this server and the Windows clients in the domain will sync with the domain controllers. Hopefully, you can now install and configure NTP on Windows Server 2019.