7:00 AM
Paul B
At my day job we use some old Dell PowerConnect 5424 switches. For the most part they have been pretty stable switches and fairly easy to configure. Well the other night they had an issue where one or more VLANs just stopped passing traffic for a minute or two, and when I went to check the logs I noticed that the time and date were off by a few years.
I decided that if I was going to use the logs for troubleshooting that the date and time should be accurate. Before the switches were configured for local time, but that apparently is very unreliable. I decided to configure them to sync time with ntp.org. To do that I ssh'd into the switches and ran the following:
Switch#confThe IP address of 108.61.73.244 points to 0.pool.ntp.org. After that configuration my time has been pretty accurate.
Switch(config)#sntp unicast client enable
Switch(config)#sntp unicast client enable
Switch(config)#sntp unicast client poll
Switch(config)#sntp anycast client enable
Switch(config)#sntp broadcast client enable
Switch(config)#sntp server 108.61.73.244 poll
Switch(config)#clock source sntp
Switch(config)#exit
Switch#copy ru st
Now if I can only find out why the VLANs stopped talking...
