Windows Time Cookbook

Maintainer: OIT Systems Engineering (ua-oit-se@alaska.edu)

Purpose

The custom resources in this cookbook implement the mechanism for configuring both the time zone and time servers in Windows. For an example of a policy for how to configure time, see the se-win-baseline cookbook.

Requirements

Chef

This cookbook requires Chef 14+

Platforms

Supported Platform Families:

• Windows

Platforms validated via Test Kitchen:

• Windows Server 2016
• Windows Server 2012
• Windows Server 2008R2
• Windows 10

Notes:

• This is a low-level cookbook with precondition that Powershell 5.0 is installed
  • Custom resources will not work with previous versions of Powershell
  • Windows 2008 and 2012 require WMF update to install Powershell 5.0
  • Powershell is not installed by this cookbook

Dependencies

This cookbook does not constrain its dependencies because it is intended as a utility library. It should ultimately be used within a wrapper cookbook.

Resources

This cookbook provides two resources for managing system time in Windows. See Set-TimeZone for details on configuring time zone in Windows.

time_client

A time_client provides a single action to configure the time server for NTP/Win32tm.

Actions

One action is provided.

• set_server_name - Post condition is that the named server is used for time queries.

Attributes

This resource has a two attributes.

• name - The name_property of the resource. Must be unique but otherwise ignored.
• server_url - The URL of a time server, e.g. ntp.alaska.edu.

time_zone

A time_zone provides a single action to set the time zone for the system clock.

Actions

One action is provided.

• set_zone - Post condition is that the named time zone is set on the system.

Attributes

This resource has a two attributes.

• name - The name_property of the resource. Must be unique but otherwise ignored.
• zone_name - The name of the time zone to be configured. Must be a valid PowerShell time zone, e.g. Alaskan Standard Time.

Recipes

win_time::default

This recipe configures possibly both time client behavior and timezone.

Attributes

Several attributes are provided for time.

Time zone attributes:

• node['win_time']['configure_time_zone'] - Defaults to true. Determines if time zone is set.
• node['win_time']['time_zone'] - Defaults to Alaskan Standard Time. Valid options are Windows PowerShell time zones.

Time server attributes:

• node['win_time']['configure_time_server'] - Defaults to true. Determines if NTP/Win32tm servers are configured.
• node['win_time']['time_server_url'] - Defaults to nil. The URL of the time server to use for NTP/Win32tm queries. Must be non-nil for the NTP server to be configured.

Examples

Custom resources can be used as below.

time_client 'UA Time Server' do
  server_url 'ntp.alaska.edu'
end

time_zone 'Alaska Zone' do
  zone_name 'Alaskan Standard Time'
end

Development

See CONTRIBUTING.md and TESTING.md.