Sometime late last week, my automatically-synchronised clock was silently reset to some time in 2176. Turning off timeserver autosynchronization of the clock fixed my otherwise unfixable Wifi problems which had appeared out of the blue and taken many hours to diagnose.
There is a chance some others may be suffering from an ubuntu time server failure so I'm sharing here. Others may experience the same issue of network handshake failure for no obvious reason, and of course without a network, the time synchronisation will never resolve itself when the server comes back online, and instead you will spend days debugging wifi problems which are not wifi problems, unless you suddenly have a flash of insight and check your system clock.
In my case, the consequences were that my Toshiba Chromebook (which had been running Lubuntu perfectly for months) suddenly failing to connect via Wifi through any client, driver or device. The hardware was clearly functional as it could scan and identify networks. I believe this is because the time is somehow part of the Wifi auth handshake.
Of course, being a chromebook there was no way to attempt to try and resolve a regression through updating software as it has no other network device. Sourcing and attaching new wifi network hardware made no difference. Use of nmcli, wpa_supplicant and dhclient from the console ended in the same failure.
I can't tell for sure if there was a problem with the timeservers. There is also a chance there's something very screwy with my hardware, but it seems unlikely that my hardware clock would suddenly leap to 2176 owing to a local failure, so thought it worth sharing on the forum given the seriousness.
There is a chance some others may be suffering from an ubuntu time server failure so I'm sharing here. Others may experience the same issue of network handshake failure for no obvious reason, and of course without a network, the time synchronisation will never resolve itself when the server comes back online, and instead you will spend days debugging wifi problems which are not wifi problems, unless you suddenly have a flash of insight and check your system clock.
In my case, the consequences were that my Toshiba Chromebook (which had been running Lubuntu perfectly for months) suddenly failing to connect via Wifi through any client, driver or device. The hardware was clearly functional as it could scan and identify networks. I believe this is because the time is somehow part of the Wifi auth handshake.
Of course, being a chromebook there was no way to attempt to try and resolve a regression through updating software as it has no other network device. Sourcing and attaching new wifi network hardware made no difference. Use of nmcli, wpa_supplicant and dhclient from the console ended in the same failure.
I can't tell for sure if there was a problem with the timeservers. There is also a chance there's something very screwy with my hardware, but it seems unlikely that my hardware clock would suddenly leap to 2176 owing to a local failure, so thought it worth sharing on the forum given the seriousness.