Intelligent Sandbox uses the date and time that you configure for all its functional and display purposes. The date and time displays on the Intelligent Sandbox web interface, reports, log files, and CLI.
You have two ways to configure the date and time:
Manually specify the date and time
Configure Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers
If you configure Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers as the time source, Intelligent Sandbox acts as an NTP client and synchronizes with the highest priority NTP server that is available. You can configure up to 3 Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers. In this case,
By default, synchronization with NTP servers is enabled in Intelligent Sandbox. Also,
pool.ntp.orgis configured as the default NTP server. The default time zone is Pacific Standard Time (UTC-8).When you upgrade from a previous version without selecting the Reset Database option, the date and time settings from the previously installed version are preserved. If you upgrade with the Reset Database option selected, the default date and time settings as described above are set.
At any point in time, there must be at least one valid NTP server specified in the Date and Time Settings page of Intelligent Sandbox. You can add, edit, or delete the list of NTP servers specified in Intelligent Sandbox.
Based on the access available to Intelligent Sandbox, you can specify public NTP servers or the ones locally on your network.
You can specify the domain name or the IPv4 address of NTP servers. If you specify the domain names, then you must have configured DNS settings in Intelligent Sandbox.
Note
If you specify public NTP servers, then using the domain names instead of IP addresses is recommended. The domain of a public NTP server might resolve to different IP addresses based on various factors.
Whether you enable NTP server synchronization or manually set the date and time, you must select the required time zone in the Date and Time Settings page. If you configure an NTP server, Intelligent Sandbox considers only the date and time from the NTP server. But for the time zone, it relies on what is specified in the Date and Time Settings page.
The date and time on a Intelligent Sandbox client has no impact on the timestamps that are displayed. Consider that the current time on the Intelligent Sandbox Appliance is 10 am PST (UTC-8). Regardless of the time zone from which you access this Intelligent Sandbox Appliance, all the timestamps are displayed in PST only. That is, the timestamps are not converted based on a client's date and time.
When the current date and time settings are changed, the timestamp for all the older records are also changed accordingly. Consider that the current time zone is PST (UTC-8) and you change it to Japan Standard Time (UTC+9). Then the timestamp for the older records are all converted as per Japan Standard Time (JST). For example, if the timestamp displayed for a record in the Analysis Status page was 0100 hours (1 am) PST before you changed the time zone. After you change the time zone to JST, the timestamp for the same record is 1800 hours JST.
The date and time settings of all the analyzer VMs are immediately synchronized to the date and time on the Intelligent Sandbox Appliance.
To use the Network Security Protocol server domain names, make sure you have configured the DNS servers.