Setup A NTP Server TO sync the windows machines locally

 Hello Guys,

I have working on a problem where i need to sync the windows machines in isolated network.So I have suggested that we need to have a local NTP server and keep syncing to it periodically. I have wrote a ansible playbook to setup NTP/chrony  server but it can be achive manually as well.

For syncing the windows machines as well we can do it locally but i have sestup a playbook which login on windows machine and syncup the time using the timeserver which we have setup.

---

- name: Set up NTP server on RHEL 9 using Chrony

hosts: all

become: yes

tasks:

- name: check if chrony is installed

shell: rpm -qa | grep chrony

register: chrony_installed

ignore_errors: True

check_mode: False

changed_when: False

- name: print

debug:

msg: "chrony is installed"

when: chrony_installed.rc == 0

- name: Install chrony package

yum:

name: chrony

state: present

when: chrony_installed.rc != 0

- name: Configure chrony as an NTP server

copy:

dest: /etc/chrony.conf

content: |

# Use the default CentOS pool servers

pool 2.centos.pool.ntp.org iburst

# Allow NTP client access from the local network

allow 192.168.1.0/24

#Allow NTP client to access from local network hostonly

allow 192.168.56.0/24

# Serve time even if not synchronized to any NTP server

local stratum 10

# Specify log file

logdir /var/log/chrony

# Dump measurements when chronyd exits

dumpdir /var/lib/chrony

# Save drift file

driftfile /var/lib/chrony/drift

notify:

- restart chronyd

- name: Enable and start chronyd service

systemd:

name: chronyd

enabled: yes

state: started

- name: Ensure firewalld is running

ansible.builtin.service:

name: firewalld

state: started

enabled: yes

- name: Open UDP port 123 for NTP (Chrony) on the server

ansible.posix.firewalld:

port: "{{ item }}/udp"

permanent: true

state: enabled

immediate: true

loop:

- 123

- 323

notify:

- Reload firewalld

handlers:

- name: restart chronyd

systemd:

name: chronyd

state: restarted

- name: Reload firewalld

ansible.builtin.service:

name: firewalld

state: reloaded

For syncing the we can go to time and date setting and  enter the IP address of the NTP server in the internet time section and click sync now. Alternatively we can also write a playbook if we want to do it in bulk which i will cover in the next article. Cheers and enjoy...!