Windows Server 2012 on EC2 – Clock running too quickly

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I have a single EC2 Instance for a small project of mine that runs Windows Server 2012 and the clock in windows seems to be gaining a minute every hour or so and it's causing issues in my token based authentication system where I try to validate some timestamps.

I have been running the same server for about 2 months now and have only very recently (last week) started having this issue.

I searched to see if anybody else was having this issue and it does not seem like it.

What are my best course of actions to correct the issue? I was thinking of creating a schedule task to run a time synchronization every 20 minutes or so but that much time drift has to be caused by something else.

Anybody got some clues of what I could do or check to fix the issue?

Best Answer

There is a SpecialPollInterval value under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpClient, I think this represents seconds between each sync with the NTP server. You could try reducing this?

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Linux – Server clock running too slow

You can resolve the problem by running NTP. If it isn't already installed you should be able to do something like

  yum install ntp
  chkconfig --levels 235 ntpd on
  service ntpd start

You may have to give it a while to sync the first time.

Windows Server 2008 – inexplicable system time jumps/glitches/inaccuracies

I'm not sure whether time sync IS the cause of your problem, but rather than disabling time sync altogether, there are some great third-party utilities for doing time sync. My personal favourite is Tardis 2000. One of the features is a 'maximum adjustment' which you could set to a few minutes (I usually use 5 minutes) - this limits the amount that the time can change in one go. In practice though, once Tardis 2000 has locked on to a time source, it measures your system clock's variation and keeps it in sync by fine-tuning the clock frequency! It'll even email you if it loses sync. Very thorough little SNTP utility.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Server clock running too slow

Windows Server 2008 – inexplicable system time jumps/glitches/inaccuracies

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