How To Manually Set Time and Date in a ShoreTel V-Switch

In the ShoreTel v-switches the time or NTP server address needs to be reachable otherwise the voice mail services will not work or not start or shutdown.

In the newer versions of ShoreTel you can now set the site NTP time server in ShoreWare Director. Prior to that ability the NTP server information had to be setup using the switch configuration screen. This was accessed via a serial cable or could you could use Putty to SSH into the switch.

After logging in using the admin user name and password you were presented with the following screen.

Setting NTP through Configuration Screen

The way to check to see if the voice mail services are actually running is to log back into the vswitch and run the svccli command and then getstatus command.

Once you hit enter you will see…

If you see <<<Time Server has not been set>>> message the time server (NTP) setting is either incorrect or not reachable.

The next test is to ctrl-z back to the main root login and run the date command to see what time the actual v-switch is currently running.

Manually setting time in V-switch

What you can do if you need to get the voice services back up and running is to run a date –set command that will get the switch the correct time and the voice mail services can start while you figure out why the NTP setting is not working.

Then run the date
command again to see if the date and time were updated. If so you can try and restart the voice mail services or wait for them to restart.