Did you know if you don’t set the time on a WLC it is very likely your access points won't join your WLC. Why do you ask!? LWAPP/CAPWAP access points contain certificates. If your controller's time is set outside of the access points certificate validity they wont join the WLC.
You can check your access points certificate validity with the following command from the AP CLI. A lot of
information will be displayed with this syntax. You are interested in the section that states "Certificate". You need to insure your WLC time is set within the APs validity time frame.
(Cisco Controller) >show crypto ca certificates
Certificate
Status: Available
Certificate Serial Number: 3BC24B9600000012211221
Certificate Usage: General Purpose
Issuer:
cn=Cisco Manufacturing CA
o=Cisco Systems
Subject:
Name: C1130-001c58734445
ea=support@cisco.com
cn=C1130-001c58734445
o=Cisco Systems
l=San Jose
st=California
c=US
CRL Distribution Points:
http://www.cisco.com/security/pki/crl/cmca.crl
Validity Date:
start date: 12:56:31 UTC Jun 30 2007
end date: 13:06:31 UTC Jun 30 2017
Associated Trustpoints: Cisco_IOS_MIC_cert
Lets set the time on the WLC. You can set the time manually which is locally stored on the WLC or via NTP server.
(Cisco Controller) >config time ?
manual Configures the system time.
ntp Configures the Network Time Protocol.
timezone Configures the system's timezone
Lets look at the manual config:
(Cisco Controller) >config time manual ?
(Cisco Controller) >config time manual <MM/DD/YY> <HH:MM:SS>
(Cisco Controller) >config time manual 12/21/09 23:30:00
Lets now look at the NTP config:
(Cisco Controller) >config time ntp ?
interval Configures the Network Time Protocol Polling Interval.
server Configures the Network Time Protocol Servers.
<Interval> is the polling interval the WLC will sync with the NTP server - between 3600 and 604800 (in seconds).
<Server> is the NTP server ip address. You also can index the NTP servers. By this it means you can add multple servers.
(Cisco Controller) >config time ntp server <index> <ip address>
(Cisco Controller) >config time ntp server 1 192.168.1.1
Note: If you want to delete your NTP entry use 0.0.0.0 as your IP address.
The last part of the config is to set the time zone