Sync your Domain with an Internet time server

Recently, the time on all of my domain computers was out of sync. Each computer in my domain had the same time, but it was about 10 minutes slow. Domain computers get their time from your domain controller(s), so I looked into syncing the time of my DC with an internet time server. The steps below can be used to sync your DC with an internet time server.

To synchronize the domain controller with an external time source

1. Click Start, and then click Command Prompt.
2. In the Command Prompt window, type the following line, where peers is a comma-separated list of IP addresses of the appropriate time sources, and press ENTER:w32tm /config /manualpeerlist: peers /syncfromflags:MANUAL
3. The time sources you choose depend on your time zone. For example, if your domain controller is located in the Pacific Time zone, this line might read:w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:131.107.1.10 /syncfromflags:MANUAL
4. In this example, the IP address of the timeserver is used instead of the fully qualified domain name for security purposes.
5. Press ENTER. You should get a message that the command completed successfully.
6. Type w32tm /config /update
7. Press ENTER. You should get a message that the command completed successfully.
8. W32time uses a variable poll interval based on the quality of timesync with the server. On DCs, this interval defaults to between 64 and 1024 seconds.
9. To immediately synchronize with the external time server, type w32tm /resync and press ENTER. You should get a message that the command completed successfully.
10. Type Exit and press ENTER.

Someone found the above steps on Technet, although a brief search of my own could not find an article with the exact same steps. The article below does discuss configuring the time source for your forest.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794937(WS.10).aspx

In step #3 above, you can change the IP address to reflect a server in your area/time zone. The example IP used was a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Internet Time Service (ITS) server. (Wow that was a mouthful!) To find an NIST server in your time zone visit the following link:

http://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi