Primary FTD lost date and is showing offline with FMC

[ABaker94985]

We have a pair of 1140 FTDs that are managed by a physical FMC. The UPS failed today, and consequently the FTDs lost power. Upon bootup, the secondary is showing healthy by the FMC and having a mate, but the primary is showing offline. I can ping the management interface of both FTDs from the FMC, and all interfaces are pingable between both FTDs.

What I noticed is that the primary has a date of 2015, while the secondary has the current date. How do we do in to fix the date on the primary? I feel pretty certain once we do, the FTD will come back online for the FMC.

Thank you.

[balaji.bandi]

Do you have NTP in the network, if so configure again the NTP as per below document :

https://ciscocustomer.lookbookhq.com/ngfwguidedjourney/guide

check is the FMC Manager establishes  the connection.

[ABaker94985 · Accepted solution]

That's the problem - the FMC does have an NTP server configured, so it has the current date and time. The FTD derives its clock from the FMC, but for whatever reason its date was reset to the year 2015 when it lost power. The FMC with the correct time refused to communicate with the FTD. 

I did get the problem resolved. I went into expert mode in the FTD, I changed the NTP server configuration in /etc/ntpd.conf from localhost to an NTP server that's on our network, restarted the NTP services, and the date and time was corrected. I reset the configuration in the ntpd.conf back to the original, and things are still communicating and time is still synced. I'm not sure if this is what TAC would have had me do, but it's what I would have done on a linux system (not necessarily setting back to localhost for NTP).