Tick, Tock … What’s Up with the WHS Clock? – Time Synch Problems
One thing that surprised me when I was installing Windows Home Server was the fact that it didn’t ask me for a time zone. Sure enough, when it finished booting up after the install the time was 2 hours off for me. WHS defaults to GMT -8, which is great if you live in California, but not so good for the rest of us around the world. Luckily, this is a simple fix and by going into the management interface and going to settings you can change your time zone. A small detail, but one that can drive you crazy when you are tracking down problems and times aren’t synchronizing up in the log files. Not to mention when WHS is trying to schedule automatic backups!
A second problem that several WHS users are reporting is that WHS is not synchronizing up correctly with the default time servers. I experienced this same error myself when I noticed an entry in my Event Log saying the time service hadn’t updated in over 84,000 seconds and was giving up. Going back into the settings tab and looking at time in the WHS console I noticed the following error.
I tried all the built-in time providers, and none of them would work. Finally, another WHS user suggested using the IP address of time-a.nist.gov (129.6.15.28) and problem solved – the time synched just fine!
It’s too early to know if this is a bug in WHS or isolated to a few people – but if you are having time synchronization issues, you might want to give this a shot.
Guest Writer
Robert Stinnett
www.robertstinnett.com
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Thanks for that tip. I now have the correct timezone, but none of the sites will synch to give me the correct time.
Marko –
Have you tried entering the IP address given above and then forcing a synch?
Robert
Time zone is supposed to be set at the OOBE time by copying from the client which you use for the OOBE. So if you did OOBE on server (which is not an intended way), you ended up without proper timezone.
Hi Sasha,
Thanks for your comment and for those of you that don’t know OOBE stands for Out of Box Experience
which describes the experience a user has when installing and performing initial configuration of WHS.
Hi Robert
When I checked again today it was synching to the site correctly.
Hi Marko,
Glad to hear all is fine now.