Updating the Time Service on Windows Home Server 2011

Those of you who know me or Rik will know that we’re both very keen on Windows Home Server. I’ve seen some time related issues with my Home Server recently, with message in the event log telling me that the time of the system (which seems to drift more than I’d like) could not be updated due to a variety of issues.

Running a manual resync of the server time (open a command prompt and type w32tm /resync) gave the following error:

Sending resync command to local computer
The computer did not resync because the required time change was too big.

I was a little confused by this, as the drift was only a minute or so from what the other PCs in the house were showing. Checking the time synchronisation configuration on the server (open a command prompt and type w32tm /query /configuration) didn’t show any particular surprises except that the MaxNegPhaseCorrection and MaxPosPhaseCorrection were both set to 3600 (one hour) rather than the more normal 54000 (15 hours), however checking the time zone of the machine did; the server was configured to use PST! I could have sworn that I’d updated the time zone when I built the server, but obviously not…

Changing the time zone of the server sorted out the correct time, however running a synchronisation from the command prompt still gave an error:

Sending resync command to local computer
The computer did not resync because no time data was available.

There are a number of other switches that can be used with the w32tm command, one of which is /rediscover, which redetects the network configuration and rediscovers network sources. With the addition of this flag to the command (w32tm /resync /rediscover) gave me a successful time synchronisation:

Sending resync command to local computer
The command completed successfully.

My Home Server is now running on the correct time!