Symptom:
Machines show arbitrary system times, often days or weeks in the past.
Probable Causes:
The are a few common causes for this problem ...
- Machines synchronise their system (software) clocks with the hardware clock on the servers on booting up. If the hardware clock is set incorrectly, the system clock gets arbitrary values.
- Machines can be configured to use the Network Time Protocol to keep times in sync. Either the machine is not configured to use NTP, or the NTP server pointed to is unreachable or defunct.
Recommendations:
Corresponding the reasons outlined above here are a few steps that can be followed to resolve the issue
- Set the correct time/timezone on the hardware clock of the server and configure the machine to read the hardware clock as local time (not UTC).
- Set up the machine to use an NTP server for synchronization. The colama server comes pre-configured as an NTP server you can use for this purpose.
- Configure a Windows machine to read the hardware clock as local time