Monthly Archives: February 2013

How to Forcibly Remove DHCP Failover Partner in Windows Server 2012

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Hello folks,

Ivailo here to talk about the new DHCP failover feature in Windows Server 2012. A real failover is finally possible. Split scopes are things of the past. Now it’s possible to configure DHCP partners in “Hot Standby” and “Load Balance” mode. Configuring DHCP failover is outside of the scope of this blog.

I would like to show you haw to forcibly remove a failed failover partner. I recently had to do this for a customer. The primary DHCP server was for some reason configured with invalid IP address (169.254.84.126) as a partner. That was not my install so I don’t have an explanation as to how this happened. In order to remove a partner in the DHCP manager the two servers have to be able to talk to each other. If one of the servers is unavailable the removal will fail. The following command can be used to force the removal of the partner:

Remove-DhcpServerv4Failover -ComputerName <server name> -Name <name of the failover partnership> -force

 

Ivailo Mitkov

How to configure an authoritative time server in Windows Server 2012

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Hello folks,

Ivailo here to talk about setting up an NTP on a PDCe. Remember this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816042?wa=wsignin1.0? The MS tool on the page used to work like a charm. Unfortunately even though according to the “Applies to” it should work on Windows Server 2012 – it doesn’t. Of course one can follow the instructions how to configure NTP manually but I am doing this way too often for my customers so I decided to save few minutes the next time I need to configure NTP on a PDCe. This is why I created the following registry hack that can be applied simply by double clicking on it. Of course you can also apply the settings using the following command…

w32tm /config /syncfromflags:manual /manualpeerlist:”<Server1>,0x1 <Server2>,0x1 <Server3>,0x1″ /update /reliable:yes

…but it will only change the AnnounceFlags, Type, and the source and leave all intervals intact which is not a best practice.

Copy the text bellow including “Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00” and paste in your favorite text editor (notepad will work)! Change the time sources depending on the server physical location (in my case US). Append 0x1 to each server and separate multiple servers with space! Save the file (for example NTPConfiguration.reg)!

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Config]
“MaxNegPhaseCorrection”=dword:00000e10
“MaxPosPhaseCorrection”=dword:00000e10
“AnnounceFlags”=dword:00000005

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters]
“NtpServer”=”0.us.pool.ntp.org,0x1 1.us.pool.ntp.org,0x1 2.us.pool.ntp.org,0x1 3.us.pool.ntp.org,0x1”
“Type”=”NTP”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpClient]
“SpecialPollInterval”=dword:00000384

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpServer]
“Enabled”=dword:00000001

 

Restart the time service:

net stop w32time && net start w32time

 

Ivailo Mitkov