Overview of Appliance NTP Support

The RISC Networks Virtual Appliances require the time and date to be accurate in order to correctly display collection scan times in the platform, for HTTPS to work properly, and for appliance software updates to be validated.

The NTP (Network Time Protocol) client is enabled by default on the RN150 appliance. There are three NTP servers hosted in the RISC Networks SaaS environment reachable via ntp.riscnetworks.com. Accordingly, outbound internet connectivity to ntp.riscnetworks.com (3.231.5.12, 18.204.38.15, 52.70.0.210) on UDP port 123 should be enabled for the RN150 to synchronize time.

In some circumstances, for example when all internet-bound traffic must be routed through a proxy, it may not be possible to enable the aforementioned outbound connectivity. There are two other options in this case.

The first is that the hostname/IP of the NTP server can be changed by visiting the Interfaces section of the RN150 configuration interface. If an intranet NTP server exists, it is recommended to configure the RN150 to use that.

Otherwise, NTP can be disabled completely in which case the RN150 will obtain its time from the VMware hypervisor that it is running in. It is important then that the hypervisor itself keeps accurate time. See VMware's documentation on the subject for details on how to configure the hypervisor to synchronize time via NTP or manually.