Showing posts with label Time on my EC2 windows instance changed automatically. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Time on my EC2 windows instance changed automatically. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Time on my EC2 windows instance changed automatically

Configure Windows time sync:

First ensure that you can get time from a NTP server, otherwise the instructions below are not going to work.
To test, get the current variance from an NTP server using the following Windows Time service command
w32tm /stripchart /samples:5 /computer:pool.ntp.org /dataonly

In a VPC we had to open UDP port 123 for inbound connections in the NAT security group.

To configure NTP time sync in Windows

1. Registry edit - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpClient
Set SpecialPollInterval to polling interval in seconds (we set ours to 60).
2. Registry edit - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\W32Time\Parameters
Set Type to NTP
3. Run the following commands to configure the time servers (can use other servers, we're using 4 time servers - 0.pool.ntp.org, time.nist.gov, 1.pool.ntp.org, and 2.pool.ntp.org)

net stop w32time

w32tm /config /syncfromflags:manual /manualpeerlist:"0.pool.ntp.org,0x1 time.nist.gov,0x1 1.pool.ntp.org,0x1 2.pool.ntp.org,0x1"

net start w32time

To review the config
w32tm /query /configuration

To check the sync against a time server
w32tm /stripchart /samples:5 /computer:pool.ntp.org /dataonly