Well you would imagine that the Win 2000 Server would know what time it is. Well if you tell it what time it is, it will know, but you don’t want to go on telling it every week, just to make sure it is still in sync. So, there are a few little services wich will do that for you.
Lets open the cmd shell and type:
net time /querysntp
… if nothing is set up there won’t be much output. So go surf in the internet and pick yourself a time server which is near you. Let’s say you find sntp.atomictime.com.
Now we need to tell your server that this is the machine wich we are going to adjust the time to.
net time /setsntp:sntp.atomictime.com
or if you feel better about having two or more time servers available do the following:
net time /setsntp:"sntp.atomictime.com another.clock.org"
If you now check
net time /querysntp
… the above entered servers will appear. In theory you machine will now sync time. It will check every 45 minutes untill it has gotten the time successful 3 times in a row and then it will relax the checking time.
But if you are like me, you want to know NOW if everything works fine and you don’t want to wait 45 minutes. So lets grab another integrated tool from MS, w32tm.
First we need to stop the internal time service, so type:
net stop w32time
… now we will sync once right here in front of our eyes where we can see what is happening.
w32tm -v -once
You will get a whole load of output, go ahead and read through it. If everything is fine you will find something to the extend of:
W32Time: Recv'ed from server 48 Bytes...
This means we got a package … and if your clock was wrong before that should be handled now as well. Dpon’t forget to restart the time service when you are done.
net start w32time
If the above doesn’t do the job for you and something doesn’t seem to connect, check your firewall. Yes, you do need to open the time port. either you have a complete package firewall and you will find a rule applying to SNTP which you can simply use, or you need to open port 123.
Hope this helps.