Configure an Authoritative Time Server with Group Policy

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An Authoritative Time Server is a must in every environment. This is one of topics covered by CTP Carl Webster in the presentation “10 things in AD that can hurt XenDesktop or XenApp and how to fix them“. Make sure you clear a half day and go through the presentation and your Active Directory to make sure it’s as healthy as possible.

Setting up an Authoritative Time Server is easy, but doing it incorrectly will get you into trouble. The same could happen if you move your PDC emulator role to another domain controller and forget to reconfigure an Authoritative Time Server.

So in this post I’ll show you how to configure an Authoritative Time Server Group Policy and using WMI filtering to apply it to the Primary Domain Controller only.

First off head over to the NTP Pool Project and pick a time server close to your location.

Then create and link an Authoritative Time Server Group Policy to the Domain Controllers Organization Unit as show in the photo above.

Open the policy and add the following settings :

Then create a WMI filter that checks for the PDC emulator role.

And finally link it to the Authoritative Time Server Group Policy.

After some time you’ll see in the event log that the time service is synchronizing the system time with the time source you defined.

Resources :

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