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Michigan Tree Time Synchronization

Last Updated: April 03, 2006

Time is critical for NDS. It is imperative that time be managed in a reliable manner. Consequently, ITCS-LNGS is charged with maintaining accurate and precise time in the Michigan Tree. A reference and two primary time servers are provided on campus and the reference time server synchronizes its time via NTP to an external time source. These three time servers use configured sources to communicate with each other to maintain time.

All other servers in the Michigan Tree should be configured as Secondary Time Servers.  These servers should be configured with Configured Sources to prevent rogue servers from disrupting time on your servers.  Here is a TIMESYNC.CFG file that you can use on your servers. 

For NetWare 6.5 servers
TIMESYNC.CFG

For NetWare 5.x and 6.x servers (IP)
TIMESYNC.CFG
Since this file will force your NetWare 5.x and 6.x servers to use IP for time synchronization, it is important to have TCP/IP configured correctly on your servers.  See the following document for Configuring TCP/IP for NetWare 5.x

After saving this file to the SYS:\SYSTEM directory of your servers as TIMESYNC.CFG (be sure .txt doesn't get added to the file name,) verify the contents of the file by opening it in a text editor and making sure that there isn't any HTML in the file.  Some browsers will add this if you saved it the wrong way.  Then issue a SET TIMESYNC RESTART FLAG=ON command at the console for this file's settings to take affect.  If time does not sync up shortly, try unloading timesync.nlm and reloading it.

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Information Technology Central Services at the University of Michigan