How to configure a Cisco Catalyst 2960 to synchronize with an NTP server

Question

I would like to synchronize a Cisco Catalyst 2960 series switch with a publicly available NTP server such as time.apple.com. I have reviewed the knowledge base article here: Catalyst 2960 Configuration Guide but am not entirely sure which parts of the "Configuring NTP" subsection are relevant to my configuration.

• How can I configure the Catalyst Switch to use an NTP server as its time source?
• How can I confirm that the time is synchronized successfully with the NTP source?

Solution

Example config:

shipping-2960# show run | i ntp

ntp server 207.182.243.123
ntp server 69.65.40.29 prefer
ntp server 208.53.158.34

To check status:

shipping-2960# show ntp status

Clock is synchronized, stratum 3, reference is 207.182.243.123
nominal freq is 190.7348 Hz, actual freq is 190.7286 Hz, precision is 2**18
reference time is D75F39BB.6F04B482 (21:08:59.433 CDT Wed Jul 2 2014)
clock offset is -6.8457 msec, root delay is 62.21 msec
root dispersion is 63.61 msec, peer dispersion is 14.11 msec

Comments

[sardean]

Thanks @ewwhite quick follow up. What command(s) do you use to set the NTP server?

[Hecter]

@dean I strongly suspect that he uses the commands that he provided as examples above.

[cpt_fink]

Also show ntp association is a brief output of each NTP server, it's statistics and master/secondary selection.