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Are there any methods I could use to provide auto-discovery for NTP? I recently moved to a new job that has a parent company that recently started providing Active Directory. I've been implementing SSSD & other stuff authenticating against AD and setting up NTP. However, they have a large number of Active Directory servers (I have to point directly at the servers) and they can sometimes change.

Is there any method such as LDAP discovery or multicast like ActiveMQ and other applications have that I can setup? If not any suggestions besides trying to get the parent company to maintain a better list of servers and what domains they function for?

Thanks!

Keith Shannon
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1 Answers1

25

You can specify an NTP server via DHCP, or Group Policy, or DNS SRV records.

DHCP:

dhcp

GPO:

gpo

SRV Record:

srv record

If your client is unable to leverage any of those mechanisms... you can also pretty safely assume that all Active Directory domain controllers are also NTP servers. Which means that you should be able to find one simply by resolving the name of the domain itself, e.g. company.com or ad.company.com and you'll likely hit an NTP server, without the need to specify individual hostnames.

Ryan Ries
  • 56,311