GPO disabling a Windows service

Recently I had a virtual machine that would not obtain an IP from DHCP. I noticed the DHCP client service was disabled in windows services. I would enable it, start it and it would start just fine. I would then reboot the VM. The DHCP client service would be disabled again. I had a feeling … Read more

Configure Windows NTP client GPO

Some applications on my network were having issues because the workstation clocks had the wrong time. I had to fix this but did not want to manually change it on every workstation. I did not want the user to have to always update this either. What I did is checked the time server my domain controller was using to sync with. It was set to time.windows.com. I used the NET TIME /QUERYSNTP command to check the NTP server.

I then went to Microsoft’s time server list here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/262680 tracked down the correct time server. Once I found the NTP server I wanted to use I set the Configure Windows NTP client GPO to reflect this so all of the workstations would sync with this time server. Here is the GPO path:

Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Windows Time Service\Time Providers

I checked the next day and all of the computers on my network had the correct time.
If you don’t want to wait you can run the following commands to stop and start the time service on your clients:

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