time.windows.com is broken… is your clock off too?

2007-04-13 15:08 time windows ntp

It seems that time.windows.com is broken, reporting unsynchronized time off by two minutes or more. Why is this a big deal? time.windows.com is the default Network Time Protocol server used by the Windows Time Service in Windows XP, 2003, and Vista systems. So there are literally millions of systems out there without an accurate source of internet time.

I have personally reported the issue to Microsoft, and Akamai as well (they seem to host the actual servers). But there has been no response from either for several days. Reports on the internet indicate that time.windows.com has been broken for at least a week!

Fortunately, it is easy to switch to a different time server. If your computer is part of a Windows domain at your workplace, it will get time from your domain controller by default, so you don’t need to do anything. If your system is a domain controller, or is stand-alone, you should run these commands:

C:\>w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:"us.pool.ntp.org,0x8" /syncfromflags:MANUAL /update  
C:\>w32tm /resync /rediscover  

Note these commands do not work on Windows 2000. For that the command would be:

C:\>net time /SETSNTP:us.pool.ntp.org  

What is us.pool.ntp.org? It is the United States address for the global NTP Pool Project. You can substitute your own two-letter country code for the “us” portion if you are not in the continental United States. If you’re in London, for example, use uk.pool.ntp.org.

The ,0x8 after the time server name tells Windows to use a client-mode association with the time server. This isn’t strictly necessary, but the proper way to configure an NTP client talking to an NTP server. If you don’t use it, Windows checks the time exactly once per hour, rather than adjusting its time-checking interval automatically based on clock performance and network conditions.

One final note, do not use popular “stratum-1” time servers to synchronize your client. These systems are typically run by national standards laboratories (an example would be time-a.nist.gov). These time servers are quite overloaded, and Windows systems cannot use the increased accuracy they provide anyway (the Windows Time Service is only accurate to about 16ms). The NTP Pool Project was started for the specific purpose of reducing the load on the Internet’s stratum-1 time-keepers.

Comments:

optionally you can use time.nist.gov with your win…

Mayuresh - May 0, 2009

optionally you can use time.nist.gov with your windows XP 2003 VISTA etc

NIST and other standards-laboratory stratum-1 time…

RPM - May 1, 2009

NIST and other standards-laboratory stratum-1 time servers are heavily loaded. A desktop Windows PC should not connect directly to any stratum-1 time server over the internet, as the high-precsion time cannot be effectively used by Windows (which has a resolution of 16 ms). The precision will be vastly reduced by Internet traffic in any case.
The NTP pool project was started for the very specific purpose of reducing the traffic load on the major public stratum-1 time servers around the world, which are a scarce resource.
In short, do not use a NIST (or USNO, or any other worldwide standards body) time server unless you absolutely must for regulatory reasons.