We have several Windows 8 machines that seem to have a problem with their local DateTime. I want them to stop syncing their time with the domain controller. How do I do this?
Some Background information:
Sometimes the Date and time just randomly changes (this might have to do with the bios but we can't pinpoint the exact problem yet).. sometimes it just jumps forward a few days, sometimes it goes back a few years etc….
On these machines we have a critical application that needs to be able to work offline and everytime the user saves data it saves the current system-datetime and when it goes online, it synchronizes the data. If we happen to have this datetime problem while the data will have incorrect dates assigned to them and we'll have a serious problem.
As a workaround we added a functionality to this critical application so that it first checks a webservice to compare the client-DateTime with the server-DateTime and if they do not match it should not synchronize data.
But unfortunately, whenever we go online the client also connects to the DC (or AD – not sure, I'm not a system admin) – and synchronizes the DateTime…. This would be good but unfortunately this way we will never know if the DateTime on the client was incorrect and our critical application will just synchronize it's data.
Best Answer
I guess you know that the time synchronisation is critical for Kerberos authentication to function correctly? Usually any difference of more than 5 minutes either way would cause a failure in authentication.
It sounds like this solution is just a temporary one though. The documentation for w32tm says that you can set the synchronisation source to NONE using the following:
If you want to run this on a remote computer, you can add
/computer:<COMPUTERNAME>.