Apple Remote Desktop Help
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# Synchronizing Computer Time

Maintaining synchronized clocks across your clients is essential for management reliability. Synchronized times allow for more precise audits and allow you to accurately correlate events between clients on the network. In addition, many internet services rely on, or benefit from, clock times that are synchronized to a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server. Any scheduled event benefits from synchronized client time.

All Mac OS X clients can be set to automatically synchronize their clocks with an NTP server. Mac OS X Server can be configured to act as an NTP server as well. In order to maintain synchronization across your clients, you should choose a single NTP server to synchronize to. Apple provides an NTP server at time.apple.com.

Setting computer time requires the use of Apple Remote Desktop's Send UNIX Command feature and its built-in command-line tool, systemsetup. See Built-in Command-Line Tools for more information about the tool.

1. Select a computer list in the Remote Desktop window.
2. Select one or more computers in the selected computer list.
3. Choose Manage > Send UNIX Command.
4. Use the provided Templates for Send UNIX Command to set the time server (see Send UNIX Command Templates for more information).
   1. Select System Setup > Network Time from the Template pop-up menu.
   2. Click Send.
   3. Select System Setup > Network Time Server from the Template pop-up menu.

   Change the time server from time.apple.com to whichever time server you want, if desired.

5. Alternatively, manually enter the UNIX command.
   1. Type or paste the following UNIX command:
      systemsetup -setusingnetworktime on -setnetworktimeserver <NTP server address>
   2. Set the user permissions for this command to be sent as the user "root."
6. Click Send.

For other maintenance tasks, see:

- Maintaining Systems