SSH to the Cisco 7970G and set the date/time

As everything so far with getting the Cisco's 7970G to work on a SIP provider has been a nightmare, I thought I would share a few of my experiences. Sometimes it's the little things that make the biggest difference so this is how you correct the date and time!

Setting the Cisco 7970G's time is actually pretty simple:

1. Download putty.exe and puttygen.exe from the putty download page
2. Generate a key using puttygen.exe
3. Update the "Key Comment" value to default@cisco
4. Save the public key in a text file called authorized_keys and save it in your TFTP file folder
5. Save the private key in your TFTP file folder
6. Run putty.exe
7. Enter your phone's IP in the "Host Name" box
8. Go to Connection --> SSH --> Auth and click the "Browse" button and select your private key file (in your TFTP folder)
9. Go to Connection --> Data and enter default under the "Auto-login username"
10. (Optional) Save the settings in case you want to login again
11. Click "Open" at the bottom of putty.exe to start the session
12. Login using the username default and password user
13. At the command prompt, type: /bin/date yyyyMMddhhmm (replacing the letters for the respective values)

Dependant on which firmware version your phone is running, the date/time might need to be in CST. If you're like me and in GMT this time website is pretty useful to keep in touch with things time wise.

When I moved the phone to 8.3.4 SR1 I found that the phone was (finally) pulling through the date/time setting correctly so I didn't need to use CST anymore. I've also set the NTP values which should automatically set the date/time which seems to be working on my phones but I've heard reports that it's not on others...