Brocade Fabric OS Administrator's Guide Supporting Fabric OS v6.3.0 (53-1001336-02, November 2009)

12 Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide

53-1001336-02

Date and time settings

Switches maintain the current date and time inside a battery-backed real-time clock (RTC) circuit

that receives the date and time from the fabric’s principal switch. Date and time are used for

logging events. Switch operation does not depend on the date and time; a switch with an incorrect

date and time value still functions properly. However, because the date and time are used for

logging, error detection, and troubleshooting, you should set them correctly.

In a Virtual Fabric there can be a maximum of eight logical switches per director or enterprise-class

platform. Only the default switch in the chassis will update the hardware clock. When the date

command is issued from a non-principal pre-Fabric OS v6.2.0 switch, it will be dropped by a Fabric

OS v6.2.0 and later switch and the pre-Fabric OS v6.2.0 switch will not receive an error.

Authorization access to set or change the date and time for a switch is role-based. For an

understanding of role-based access, refer to “Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)” on page 74.

Setting the date and time

1. Connect to the switch and log in using an account assigned to the admin role.

2. Enter the date command, using the following syntax:

date "mmddHHMMyy"

The values represent the following:

• mm is the month; valid values are 01 through 12.

• dd is the date; valid values are 01 through 31.

• HH is the hour; valid values are 00 through 23.

• MM is minutes; valid values are 00 through 59.

• yy is the year, valid values are 00-37 and 70-99 (year values from 70-99 are interpreted as

1970-1999, year values from 00-37 are interpreted as 2000-2037).

Example of showing and setting the date

switch:admin> date

Fri Sep 29 17:01:48 UTC 2007

Stealth200E:admin> date "0204101008"

Mon Feb 4 10:10:00 UTC 2008

Time zone settings

You can set the time zone for a switch by name. You can specify the setting using country and city

or time zone parameters. Switch operation does not depend on a date and time setting. However,

having an accurate time setting is needed for accurate logging and audit tracking.

If the time zone is not set with new options, the switch retains the offset time zone settings. The

tsTimeZone command includes an option to revert to the prior time zone format. For more

information about the tsTimeZone command, see the Fabric OS Command Reference.

When you set the time zone for a switch you can perform the following tasks:

• Display all of the time zones supported in the firmware.

• Set the time zone based on a country and city combination or based on a time zone ID

such as PST.