Setting Time on Cisco & HP switches

Setting correct time on the network devices is a very important step, when you configure new equipments. But most of the people don't care this in case of switches and other devices.

But be aware, the correct time on the devices will help you a lot when you refer logs to find out the details of any issues or access related items etc.

Here I am putting some simple commands to configure time on Cisco and HP Procurve switches.

Adding NTP server names in these devices is the easier and safer way, but if you don't have an NTP server in house and no interest of using public NTP servers, then you may need to set the time locally.

Cisco

On a Cisco device (switch or router), use the following commands to add an NTP server

switch01(config)# ntp server 131.107.1.10
switch01(config)# ntp server 202.152.74.200 prefer

prefer means this is the preferred one.

And if you want to set it manually on the machine, use the following commands.

switch01(config)#clock timezone IST +5

The above command will set the timezone, my time zone is IST and the +5 denotes it is 5 hour ahead from GMT.

For setting date and time, need to run the command on privileged execution mode (enable#). The following is the syntax of setting the same.

clock set hh:mm:ss <1-31> MONTH <1993-2035>

So we can run the command as follows,

switch01#clock set 18:30:01 26 May 2011

We can check the current time on the switch by show clock command and the output will be similar as below,

switch01#show clock
18:31:19.738 IST Thu May 26 2011

HP Procurve

To setup Procurve to use external NTP servers for time synchronization, use the following commands.

switch02(config)#sntp server 192.43.244.18
switch02(config)#sntp unicast
switch02(config)#timesync sntp

If you prefer to set the time manually, you can use any of the following pair of commands.

time MM/DD[/[YY]YY]
time HH:MM[:SS]
(OR)
clock set MM/DD[/[YY]YY]
clock set HH:MM[:SS]

switch02(config)# clock set 05/26/2011
switch02(config)# clock set 18:35:01

We can use show time command to display the current time on the system and the output will be similar as follows,

switch02(config)#show time
Thu May 26 18:58:12 2011

Hope this will help somebody like me, who need to google several times a day to find valuable informations.

Find dormant accounts on a Linux server

In busy production systems, there will be lot of accounts which may not be using from longer intervals. Finding them we have standard linux utilities like "last" and "lastlog".

The "last" command display the audit details of the users who were logged in the system with time frame. On the other hand "lastlog" display all the user's last logged in details with time frame.

last command uses the log file /var/log/wtmp for getting the user data. As in the modern linux systems, the wtmp file is rotating monthly basis the last command gives only the current month's statistics.

If we want to have the last command output with an yearly statistics, we need to change the rotation configuration in /etc/logrotate.conf as below,

/var/log/wtmp {
missingok
monthly <= change it to "yearly"
create 0664 root utmp
rotate 1
}

The following script will display the users who are not logged in the last 3 calendar months including the current month. I am sure this will be usefull for people like me to get a clear idea of who are not active on the system.

#!/bin/bash
#
#
# Gives a list of users who have not logged in the last 3 calendar months including the current one.
#
umask 077

THIS_MONTH=`date +%h`
LAST_MONTH=`date --date="1 month ago" +%h`
LLAST_MONTH=`date --date="2 months ago" +%h`

last | grep "$THIS_MONTH \|\ $LAST_MONTH \|\ $LLAST_MONTH" | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u > /tmp/users1$$
cat /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{print $1}' | sort -u > /tmp/users2$$
comm -13 /tmp/users[12]$$
rm -f /tmp/users[12]$$


The above script assumes the last command can show the user statistics of more than 3 months.

Using "lastlog"

The simple and dirty way to find the dormant accounts on a linux system is using the"lastlog" command. The following script will do the trick.

#!/bin/bash
#
#
# Gives a list of users who have not logged in the last 90 days.
#
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin;export PATH
umask 077
lastlog -b 90 |grep -iv Never | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u > /tmp/users1$$
lastlog |grep -iv Never | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u > /tmp/users2$$
comm -2 /tmp/users[12]$$ | grep -v Username
rm -f /tmp/users[12]$$