Lake Denman

Set the date in linux

I was recently trying to upload a file to Amazon’s S3 server. Unfortunately, every time that I tried to upload the file from my server, I received the error below:

RequestTimeTooSkewed: The difference between the request time and the current time is too large.

After a bit of googling about, I realized that I should probably check the date on the server, so:

$ date
Mon Dec  7 23:12:18 EST 2009

Well, although you can’t really tell, the date was behind about five hours from the actual eastern time. The first way that I tried to update the server time was to run rdate.

rdate - get the time via the network

Well, it seems that I kept getting timed out when trying to use rdate. So, I got dirty and used plain old date to update the time.

This is the quick and dirty solution...

To display the current date/time

    $ date
    

To set the date/time

    $ sudo date MMDDhhmmYYYY
    

Example:

    $ sudo date 043017212008
    

(that is the time of my posting)

MM - Two digit month number
DD - Two digit date
hh - Two digit 24 hour system hour
mm - Two digit minute
YYYY - Four digit year code

That date was updated successfully and then I was able to upload to Amazon S3. Good times…

Answer found here: http://www.forum.psoft.net/archive/index.php/t-13307.html