Linux Administration Cookbook

Don't trust time

A good 70 percent of the time (random figure), I've found time to be the root cause of most of my problems. It is because of this that one of the first commands I run when I log on to a box is date:

$ dateTue 11 Dec 17:51:33 UTC 2018

If the time is wrong (and not just offset because of timezones), then there's a very good chance that the weird and wonderful problems you're seeing are the direct result of two or more computer systems arguing about which of their completely arbitrary representations of time is correct. 

Fix time before you fix anything else.

Incorrect time and fixing incorrect time can cause problems of its own so, check and keep backups regularly.