I love Ubuntu and Linux. I really do. Some days, though, it does some tremendously stupid things. Before I left the house this afternoon, I tried to hibernate. That failed and hung up the machine. Annoying, but I can accept that. The fun begins when you reboot and the clock says it’s 2:38PM, but it’s really 4:48PM. Weird, but okay. Open the Date/Time settings in GNOME, and yep, it’s set to the proper time zone, and set to sync against various Internet time servers. Close that dialog and the time changes to 12:38AM. What the heck?
So, being all old-school, I break the Ubuntu use-case and open up a terminal to run ntpdate.
stone@mithril:~$ sudo -s
sudo: timestamp too far in the future: Jan 4 14:16:03 2007
Smack
Sudo is so powerful that, despite traveling backwards along the time-space continuum, it is preventing me from obliterating my future-self through some wreckless super-user action. Take that, Vista. Linux prevents you from creating a paradox!
I have had the exact same experience twice. It seems like the clock occasionally gets messed up after reboot. In order to fix it, I had to set the clock back to where sudo expected it to be, and then I used sudo -K to erase the current time stamp before setting the clock to the correct time again.