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Added by Rick Trader November 4, 2019

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If you have time sensitive applications in your environment, you need to ensure that your system time on both your networking devices and on your computers is set to the right time.

These time sensitive applications such as a lot of your accounting apps, if you have an Active Directory environment, or you have a directory services environment where you’re using something like Kerberos as authentication, they have a maximum skew of time.

If you are using for instance, Microsoft’s Active Directory environment, when a user goes to log in to Active Directory, if their computer clock is off by more than five minutes of the directory service domain controller, it’s going to authenticate them, that user account can authenticate which means they can’t have access to corporate resources.

If we’re using Novell, UNIX or Linux as directory services or environment, they have the same type of limitations, if the user goes the login and not can be a login.

If you have an accounting program, accounting program might be very time sensitive, so that if the clock on your local machine gets off with the accounting software, the accounting software may not work properly.

We need to ensure that our system time’s used correctly

If we have a work group joined computer, in other words, it’s in a peer-to-peer environment, that computer can be set to check time with any type of network time provider that’s on the Internet.

If you’re in a directory service such as Microsoft’s directory services or Novell’s directory services, and if they’re using an authentication protocol Kerberos, that authentication of the clock has to be synchronized within five minutes.

We will time sync with what are the directory server is that authenticated the computer. What happens is when the computer turns on, the computer will time sync with that time server.

Microsoft, (by default) updates every 15 minutes so that the time on domain joined computers to ensure that domain computer joined computer doesn’t get off.

Now that we know how time is sensitive in a light sensitive environment, let’s take a look at where we can configure it, and you take a look at where time is actually set in the machine.

This is a Windows 10 computer, if we come down to my notification area, which some people used to call system tray, we have date and time in here.

This will show us our date and time what we’re currently using.

If we want to actually change this, we need to bring up my Control Panel by simply typing Control Panel and clicking on it.

Then navigate to Clock and Region – Change date, time, or number formats.

Under Date and Time. we have the option to change today’s date and time.

We can change the time.

In order to change the time in this machine, we must have local administrator rights.

If we want to change the time zone, we don’t need to have administrator rights.

This allows us to change time zone if we are a user of the laptop, and we’re traveling.

If our computer is a member of a domain, we do not get the Internet time option. If our computer is a member of a work group, which means it’s not being authenticated by domain controller, We have the option to set an Internet time.

We could pick a different time server from around the world that we want this machine to time sync with on a daily basis to ensure that my time is always up to date with some type of third party time server that’s around the world.

By default, it defaults to the time that windows.com, which is a time server posted in Microsoft, or we come down to the one that’s posted by the government and with that uses time.nist.gov.

If we’re doing an update we can click OK and it will sync our time with that that time server and it keeps the time up to date. If you have time sensitive applications in your environment, you need to ensure that your current machines are time syncing with whatever authentication service authenticating them.

If you have machines that are not connected to the domain and the worker‑based machines, you still have time sensitive applications. You don’t want those machines that time sync with some type of external time source.

Until next time….

Rick Trader
CompTIA Network + Instructor – Interface Technical Training
Phoenix, AZ

Video Certification Training: CompTIA Network +