Reference Guide

Configuring System Information 79
DELL CONFIDENTIAL – PRELIMINARY 3/6/14 - FOR PROOF ONLY
System Time from an SNTP Server
This section describes how to configure SNTP servers. It contains the
following topics:
•Overview
• SNTP Global Settings
• SNTP Authentication
•SNTP Servers
• SNTP Interface Settings
Overview
The switch supports the Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP), which
provides accurate network switch clock time synchronization of up to 100
milliseconds. The implementation of SNTP is based on SNTPv4 (RFC 2030).
SNTP is a simple and lighter version of NTP, and can be used when the
ultimate performance of the full NTP implementation, described in
RFC-1305, is not required. SNTP operates with NTP, thus an SNTP client
can work with both SNTP and NTP servers.
The switch operates only as a client, and cannot provide time services to other
systems.
SNTP Server Types
The switch can accept time information from the following server types:
•Unicast
Polling for Unicast information is used for polling a server whose IP
address is known. This is the preferred method for synchronizing device
time, as it is most secure.
Up to eight SNTP servers can be defined.
If this method is selected, SNTP information is accepted only from SNTP
servers defined in the
SNTP Servers page.
Time levels T1 - T4 (see the Algorithm for Selecting Designated SNTP
Server section) are used to determine from which server time information
is accepted.