For those of you that don’t or can’t use NTP on your ESX servers and occasionally have problems with time, here’s how to alter the time through the command line.

The date command is a standard Linux command, but is not the easiest to remember the parameter order for setting a new date/time.

Firstly log onto your ESX box via a putty session or by physically standing at the machine and type date and you’ll see something like:

[root@northesx01 root]# date
Thu May 1 14:57:55 BST 2008

If this time is out like mine was, then type the following:

date -s “MM/DD/YYYY HH:SS”

So in my case it looked something like this:

date -s “05/01/2008 15:07″

Once you’ve completed this it is a good idea to sync the hardware clock with the Service Console and this is done using another standard Linux command called hwclock.

To check the current time for the hardware clock type:

hwclock

After this type:

hwclock –systohc

All done.

I would say at this point that it is always best to use NTP where possible.

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