Forcing F5 to synchronise time via NTP

When time looks like this on your F5 box:

And time in the real world looks like this:

Things aren’t going to go so well for your users.

What you want to do is check that your device has [When time looks like this on your F5 box:

And time in the real world looks like this:

Things aren’t going to go so well for your users.

What you want to do is check that your device has](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol) configured (System -> Configuration -> Device -> NTP) and that your handy firewall isn’t blocking the traffic (udp/123 folks!).

If that’s all good, and you can see traffic is flowing (you’ve got your firewall syslog flowing into Splunk,  yeah?) The next trick is to check if NTP is even running.

SSH into the device and run show /sys service ntpd. 

On my device, it was running, but it was busted for whatever reason.

Ok,  sometimes you just have to kick it in the guts.

This will get you into a bash shell, then restart the [When time looks like this on your F5 box:

And time in the real world looks like this:

Things aren’t going to go so well for your users.

What you want to do is check that your device has [When time looks like this on your F5 box:

And time in the real world looks like this:

Things aren’t going to go so well for your users.

What you want to do is check that your device has](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol) configured (System -> Configuration -> Device -> NTP) and that your handy firewall isn’t blocking the traffic (udp/123 folks!).

If that’s all good, and you can see traffic is flowing (you’ve got your firewall syslog flowing into Splunk,  yeah?) The next trick is to check if NTP is even running.

SSH into the device and run show /sys service ntpd. 

On my device, it was running, but it was busted for whatever reason.

Ok,  sometimes you just have to kick it in the guts.

This will get you into a bash shell, then restart the](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntpd) service and then forcefully do a query to the NTP server you specify. If this doesn’t work, it’s time to check if your support agreement’s up to date 🙂