Lightweight Access Point Clock

[ac5334]

Hi

I have an HA pair of 9800 WLAN Controllers configured with a timezone and BST summertime:

clock timezone GMT 0 0
clock summer-time BST recurring last Sun Mar 2:00 last Sun Oct 2:00

They get their time from NTP and everything looks good for the associations.  A show clock shows the correct date and time.  I noticed that if I logged into a lightweight AP and did show clock, the date was correct but the clock was exactly one hour behind.  When I checked the AP Join Profile the settings time related settings were wrong, it was pointing at an old NTP server, so I updated this to the same NTP server used by the WLC and set timezone to Use Controller.  I rebooted an AP that uses this profile but the clock still showed an hour behind.  If I issue the command show ntp on the AP, all looks good.

CUC-XXX-AP02#show ntp
Stratum Version Last Received  Delay       Offset      Jitter       NTP server
3            4         46sec ago       0.024ms  0.014ms  0.066ms 10.x.x.x

I then tried setting the AP Join Profile Timezone to Not Configured hoping that the AP will just use the timezone from the NTP server, but it's still an hour off.

Any ideas?

 

[Mark Elsen]

  - @ac5334                     >...the date was correct but the clock was exactly one hour behind.  
                                        Could you post an example output from the above observation too.
                                        
  M.

[Mark Elsen]

  - @ac5334           Actually the AP cannot get the timezone through NTP ;  check Use-Controller in the AP join profile

  M.

[aleabrahao]

@ac5334 

Actually, you don’t define the time zone in the join profile, that is information the AP will update via the CAPWAP tunnel.

It is indeed strange that the time is not updated. I suspect the AP might have some residual, junk configuration.

If possible, try performing a factory reset on the AP and see if the issue persists.

[Flavio Miranda]

@ac5334 
Try to setup the WLC with only the hours-office and omit the minute offset. AP should get this from wlc but it is not interpreting correctly the hour apparently
clock timezone zone hours-offset [minutes-offset]

[ac5334 · Accepted solution]

Thanks to all who have taken the time to look at this.  The resolution was to remove the timezone GMT 0 0 command on the WLC

[Rich R]

It works fine for me:
clock timezone GMT 0 0
clock summer-time BST recurring last Sun Mar 1:00 last Sun Oct 2:00
!
ap profile XXXXX
...
 timezone use-controller

9800#show clock
14:27:04.631 BST Wed Oct 21 2026

On AP:
AP001#sh clock
*14:27:23 UTC+0100 Wed Oct 21 2026
AP001#sh ntp
Stratum Version Last Received Delay Offset Jitter NTP server
5 4 203sec ago 2.662ms 1.331ms 0.427ms 172.31.240.1

Correct time and time zone on AP.