NTP Time Server that use BST?

[mike1210]

Hi all, bit of an odd and potentially stupid question. I have a Cisco 877W and 2940 switch that I sync to an external time server. This works fine however all the ones I have found are one hour behind. Do any NTP servers use BST or is it because they are all Unix boxes that run off UTC time?

I was syncing to UK ones

 

[matja]

All NTP servers measure time internally as TAI/UTC, your system's time zone information should do the necessary daylight savings calculation. If a NTP server is sending BST, then it's faulty

 

[tolien]

You don't really want your infrastructure gaining and losing an hour in the middle of the night anyway, if for no reason than it'll really mess up your logs.

 

[mike1210]

cheers, for info I actually just found what I needed for the Cisco boxes

on the switch I had to tell it to look for DNS servers so

conf t
ip domain-lookup
ip name-server 212.23.3.100
ip name-server 212.23.6.100


This wasnt needed on the router (already configured) so for both switch and router I then did the following

Router# configure terminal
Router(config)# ntp server <IP address of NTP Server>

thats easy enough and worked straight away

below is the bst part

ciscorouter# conf term
ciscorouter(config)# clock timezone gmt 0
ciscorouter(config)# clock summer-time BST recurring last Sun Mar 2:00 last Sun Oct 2:00

above command sets the time zone to BST (British Summer Time) between the last day of March at 2am and last Sunday of October 2am after which the timezone reverts back to GMT. This should automatically change the times when the Summer time kicks in

Edited to add thanks Tolien, I take your point about messing up logs

above bit taken from itsyourip.com

 

[Tui]

If you're going to all this trouble, you'll want the change over at the right time. Both are at 1 am GMT, so GMT to BST will be at 01:00 and BST to GMT at 02:00 BST. Line should read:
clock summer-time BST recurring last Sun Mar 1:00 last Sun Oct 2:00

Logging and debugging times shouldn't be a problem with the 877, just use the show-timezone option in the service timestamps commands.

 

[mike1210]

Tidy Cheers