installworld: check your date/time - Installworld NOT possible...

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 04:06:42PM -0800, Chris H wrote:
> Greetings,
>  I've spent the morning grooming a fresh kernel on a freshly installed
> 8.1 amd64, from the DVD. I cvsup'd src && ports last night.
> Build world && kernel && installkernel went as anticipated.
> HOWEVER, a reboot to single user, followed by a mergemaster -p, followed by
> cd /usr/src && make installworld, returned:
> "/usr/src/Makefile", line 177: check your date/time: <current date and time here>
> 
> WTF? Should I simply comment lines 174-178?
> Why does make(1) refuse to installworld? My date and time are correct (in sync).
> Any insight into this error would be GREATLY appreciated.

Usually this error indicates that your clock is skewing excessively
(meaning going backwards or forwards too much).  How/why this is a
problem has to do with how make works, and is for a separate discussion
some other time.

Are you running ntpd on the machine?  How is your clock being kept in
sync?  What timecounter is being used?

sysctl kern.timecounter

If you're using ntpd, please provide output from:

ntpq -c peers
ntpdc -c peers

If the problem turns out to be a faulty timecounter, the easiest way to
solve the problem is to replace the motherboard.

If you're not using ntpd, you should be, and will need to wait ~48 hours
(this is not an exaggeration) for the clock skew calculation to
determine a median value.  If you're using something like ntpdate via a
cron job, this is almost certainly the cause of your problems.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP 4BD6C0CB |