Time synchronisation for Novell
 Time synchronisation is necessary to provide accurate time across the Novell NetWare network. The provision of an accurate time ensuresthat directory services operations proceed in an orderly fashion.
NTP and Netware 5 and 6
NetWare provides built-in time synchronisation functionality in its Novell-provided Timesync.NLM. Timesync.NLM in NetWare 4.x could onlyuse IPX as its communication protocol. In NetWare 5, Timesync.NLM has been enhanced to work over TCP/IP and act as an NTP client.
NetWare 5 and 6 can easily be configured to synchronize to any of Galleon NTP servers:
Key Benefits
Using the Novell-provided Timesync.NLM with an NTP time server has a number of key benefits:
- Reliable and secure source of time.
- Easy to install, configure and maintain.
- Low processing overhead on Netware Server, using built-in functionality.
- Fault tolerance can be acheived by using multiple NTP servers.
- NTP server can be used to synchronise other clients on the network such as Netware servers, routers, Windows clients, UNIX clients andmore.
Configuring a NetWare Server as an NTP Client
To configure a NetWare Server to act as a NTP client, first identify the root time servers in the network. This is either the 'singlereference' server or the 'reference' and 'primary' servers together.
Update the root servers so that they obtain time from the NTP server time source:
SET TIMESYNC TIME SOURCE=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:123
Where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx specifies the IP address of the NTP server. Port 123 is the UDP port used by NTP.
The entire network looks to the root time sources for time. Therefore, the entire network will be synchronised to the NTP server.
NTP Fault Tolerance
Configuring TimeSync.NLM with multiple NTP server sources can provide fault tolerance. If a server fails, time can be obtained fromother servers in the list. Multiple sources can be specified by separating the IP addresses of each server by a semi-colon:
SET TIMESYNC TIME SOURCE=192.168.0.1:123;192.168.0.2:123;
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