What is "clock skew detected"?

When compiling ("make" command) apache on Solaris 8, Sun Sparc. I get this message "clock skew detected".

What is this message mean?

It means that the "make" program detected that a file's timestamp seems to be in the future.
This can happen if
- You change the time during compiling, commonly in a cronjob using netdate. Run ntpd instead.
- You are using NFS and your client's clock is not synchronized with the server's. Run ntpd.
- Certain OSs/Filesystems only have an accuracy of two seconds, e.g. FAT filesystems. Don't know about Solaris though. No solution that I know of.

Run a "make clean" before "make" to remove files that may have future timestamps.

There may be other reasons, but I think you can safely ignore the message.

M.

PS: Moved to unix forums.

Hmm... file timestamp in the future.....

I just checked my Sun system, the system date appear to be May 2004...... Is it possible the system date cause this problem?

Although I can ignore this message, but I wish I could change the system date. How to change system date in unix or x-11.

There you go


Login as root in a terminal. Check "man date" for the correct format, I don't know about Solaris. Something like "date -s 20050711" but the format depends on your system and maybe also the locale.

Since your system clock is far in the past, you can use "date" this time to set it correctly. But for future reference, always use "ntpd". ntpd will not make the date/time jump suddenly because this leads to more confusion. Instead, it will slow down or accelerate the clock, thus keeping log-files and such as valid as possible.

M.