Setting up a reliable time source is must in any environment. In the MS Windows Active Directory world this actually can not be found in the GUI or via a wizard. We gotta go to the dreaded command line. 🙂

It’s actually fairly straight forward. Please note that it must be run to the BDC FISMO role holder.
If you don’t happen to know where the BDC role resides use the following command

 netdom /query fsmo

Okay now onto the time-server setup.

Lets stop the time service:

 net stop w32time

Next we will specify some items with some switch options–basically we are telling it we have a manual peer list (you can always see the full definition by doing a

 w32tm ?

Let us specify our peer list.

 w32tm  w32tm /config /syncfromflags:manual /manualpeerlist:”timeserver1.org, timeserver2.org”

Next we have to advertise out that we are reliable time source to our client workstations

 w32tm /config /reliable:yes

Restart the time service on the BDC

 net start w32time

If everything went well you should see valid time synchronization information from your peer target by running the following command.

 w32tm /query /configuration

See that wasn’t too hard…