I inherited administration of an offline domain environment with a NetApp (OnTap 9.11) and no dedicated NTP appliance
Because the environment is offline, we have significant issues with time skew from the hardware. While we are looking for a better solution, at this stage we manage it by manually fixing the time roughly every month.
It appears that this also led the to the previous administrators giving up on using CIFS shares. The shares exist and there is evidence they tried to make it work. But ultimately the shares are empty and other arrangements through Windows VM's are currently employed...all of which are on old OS's and need to be updated.
I've been given the task of trying to fix things...and I really don't want to build new Windows servers and kick the can further down the road.
The immediate issue is the time skew/sync. I want to use the domain controller as the NTP server, at least this way, the time skew *should* be the same on all devices
The NetApp was already configured to use the DC as the NTP server, but it wasn't syncing. After a bit of a fight, using information from ONTAP 9 - time server rejected as unreliable - NetApp Knowledge Base. I did manage to get the NetApp to sync to the domain controller.
1 month later, go to fix the time skew.
Domain controller: Time skew as expected
NetApp: Time is still correct
I can only surmise that this means that the NetApp is not continuously syncing with the Domain Controller. It got the time once and then just did its own thing.
How can I force the NetApp to sync more often?
