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I have an business application that uses the system date for all of it's date processing. We need to be able to fix the date to a particular date, and at midnight, reset the date back to this fixed date. This was all possible in Windows Server 2003, and though we had to connect to file shares on the box using the IP address instead of the machine name, it would work. We're in the middle of an upgrade to Windows Server 2012, and we've found a number of problems.

1) Connecting via Remote Desktop doesn't work anymore - we've managed to resolve this using a custom connections file and changing the type of authentication.

2) File shares do not seem to work anymore at all

I'm sure something had to be changed on the Windows 2003 servers to get this to work, but it was around 7 years ago that it was all set-up, and I wasn't involved in that area at the time.

Any tips would be really appreciated. I've been googling this several times to no avail!

AdCar
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    Your testing has identified that this flaw in your business application must be fixed. I am sure that the flaw was _known_ seven years ago, but intentionally ignored. Now the bill has come due for this technical debt. – Michael Hampton Apr 16 '16 at 18:42
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    Yes - it's been known about for several years, but the vendor of the application has refused to change it. – AdCar Apr 16 '16 at 19:10
  • I don't go with the downvotes. I think the question is clear and useful. In my specific case, I was asked to consider this scenario, and can point to this source to confidently answer that it is a *not* an option we want to consider. – simonpa71 Dec 30 '16 at 18:08

2 Answers2

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I used to work at a place that did this with a training system. (I don't remember which version of Windows it was, but it certainly wasn't 2012--it was 2003 or 2008.)

Basically, they had to use only local accounts because Kerberos will not allow you to connect to a server whose system time is five months out of date (or whatever).

I haven't tested backdating a Windows server 2012 machine and connecting to it with local accounts, so I can't tell you if that would work. I'm assuming that the issues are increased security of Remote Desktop (RDP was unencrypted in 2003) and perhaps the shares used to fall back to NTLM in Server 2003 and now they just fail, but, again, I haven't tested this.

Try the local accounts and see if that helps. If not, I suspect you may be out of luck. (I don't imagine this is a supported use case.) Sorry to be such a downer.

Katherine Villyard
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There is a way to change time and date on Windows 2012 Server, even if the server is located behind Active Directory or Kerberos. The tool is called Time Machine, which practically allows to set virtual date and/or time per user, group and process. Thus, avoiding the unexpected system lockout when the date differs between AD and the host.

Seb1
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