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.