A mysterious issue is affecting the default Windows NTP server (time.windows.com), according to multiple complaints coming from Reddit and Twitter users, screwing up everyone's computer clocks.
Based on reports, the time.windows.com NTP server is sending Windows users the incorrect time, sometimes off by seconds, but in other cases, off even by hours. The issue was spotted today, April 3, early in the morning, and is ongoing for at least 10 hours.
The impact was felt immediately by servers that rely on the Windows NTP service to schedule and execute tasks. Unhappy admins found their servers launching routines early or too late, botching scripts and crashing their applications.
[...] UPDATE: A Microsoft representative acknowledged the issue. "We investigated and quickly resolved the issue our time service experienced," the Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an email. Tests carried out by Bleeping Computer confirmed the Windows NTP serrvice is up and running at the time of this update.
Source: Bleeping Computer
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday April 06 2017, @07:48AM (1 child)
Anyone using just one timeserver is an idiot anyway. If one skews like this, it will just be ignored. If you ONLY have one, of course it messes everything up. And I echo the sentiment others have expressed, that time.windows.com is more often down than up (I assume some kind of rate-limiting or similar, but it's nowhere near reliable).
You should be sticking in at least pool.ntp.org but more usefully 0..pool.ntp.org, 1..pool.ntp.org and 2..pool.ntp.org
Amazingly, Windows only show you one in the interface (which is just hilarious) but you can push as many as you like via GPO / the registry. Most Linux distros use multiple ones of either NTP pool or their own time servers.
That said, if you care about time in any significant fashion (e.g. the 5-minute Kerberos login window on Windows networks), then you should be using a mixture of in-house and multiple external servers. Otherwise when your Internet goes down for a day, your clients all start to slide out of sync and eventually will refuse to log on to the domain.
It's not hard to set up an internal NTP server, and it takes basically zero resources. Also, are you really also manually time-syncing your phones, PCs, etc. systems?
Hell, I run public NTP pool servers, it takes literally a minute or so to set up on any Internet-connected Linux machine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @01:29PM
Is time.microsoft.com really just one time server, or does it operate like pool.ntp.org?