Listing remote Date and Time with PowerShell

December 5, 2012 Alan Microsoft, PowerShell, 2

Recently I needed to find the remote time of multiple windows servers on the network and compare these, I wrote a quick function that uses WMI to pull this information and return it in a DateTime object format:

The Code

function Get-Time {
	<#
		.SYNOPSIS
			Gets the time of a windows server

		.DESCRIPTION
			Uses WMI to get the time of a remote server

		.PARAMETER  ServerName
			The Server to get the date and time from

		.EXAMPLE
			PS C:\> Get-Time localhost

		.EXAMPLE
			PS C:\> Get-Time server01.domain.local -Credential (Get-Credential)

	#>
	[CmdletBinding()]
	param(
		[Parameter(Position=0, Mandatory=$true)]
		[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]
		[System.String]
		$ServerName,

		$Credential

	)
	try {
			If ($Credential) {
				$DT = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_LocalTime -ComputerName $servername -Credential $Credential
			} Else {
				$DT = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_LocalTime -ComputerName $servername
			}
	}
	catch {
		throw
	}

	$Times = New-Object PSObject -Property @{
		ServerName = $DT.__Server
		DateTime = (Get-Date -Day $DT.Day -Month $DT.Month -Year $DT.Year -Minute $DT.Minute -Hour $DT.Hour -Second $DT.Second)
	}
	$Times

}

#Example of using this function
$Servers = "localhost", "dc01.domain.local"

$Servers | Foreach {
	Get-Time $_
}

Checking for time skew

We can also use this function to easily check for time skew between two machines, the below code is an example where I check my time between a remote host and the local server to see if it is within 30 seconds…

$RemoteServerTime = Get-Time -ServerName "dc01.domain.local"
$LocalServerTime = Get-Time -ServerName "localhost"

$Skew = $LocalServerTime.DateTime - $RemoteServerTime.DateTime

# Check if the time is over 30 seconds
If (($Skew.TotalSeconds -gt 30) -or ($Skew.TotalSeconds -lt -30)){
	Write-Host "Time is not within 30 seconds"
} Else {
	Write-Host "Time checked ok"
}

-Alan

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