Clock is not Updating After Hard reboot.

[Sunil Patil]

Hi Team,

I am having 1 Cisco 5520 in our network. we don't have the NTP Server so we manually configured the Clock for the devices. We observed that when we give a soft (Command) reboot the box the time and day is updated. But we faced issue when we give a hand reboot (Power down by switch off the Power button) the date and time is not updated and go to 2003 year.

Kindly suggest what issue with the ASA.

[Richard Burts]

I am not authoritative on this issue. But it seems to me likely that when you issue the reload command that the ASA is doing an orderly shutdown and saving some data that allow it to recover the date and time. But when you power down the ASA that it does not have the valid and current state of that data and so must use the default date and time. If this causes problems then perhaps you should investigate implementing NTP server access.

HTH

Rick

[Sunil Patil]

We are having a NTP server but we are using the ASA box as outside of network and down the box in inside we are having other firewall. So we are able to ping the NTP from ASA

I just wasn't to know that is a normal behavior or there is some issue with the box.

[Richard Burts]

I would guess that this is normal and not a problem with the box. And it is a good example of the benefit from running ntp with some server rather than depending on manual intervention which is needed only sometimes.

HTH

Rick

[Marius Gunnerud · Accepted solution]

I am not entirely sure that this is normal...As Richard has mentioned when you do a "soft" reboot the ASA goes through a series of shutdow procedures which may include taking a snapshot of the current time during reboot.

But when you change the system time on the ASA the ASA updates the system BIOS which is powered by a battery on the motherboard.  So in the case of even a "hard" reboot that time should still be stored in BIOS which is powered seperately. 

Before, thinking this is normal behavior, and if this is a really important issue to resolve in the case that you can not use an NTP server, I would suggest changing the battery on the motherboard, perhaps it has gone flat.

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