Comment 30 for bug 43233

I was talking a person in another country through the install of Ubuntu Server via IM today, with the intention of taking over via SSH as soon as possible (he doesn't know anything about command line Linux). Everything worked fine until - boom - when trying to install SSH, this error just happened to us, no idea why. There's no dual boot, and for that matter, the machine never rebooted since the one after install. Possibly, since we didn't have internet from the start, it adjusted the time from NTP when I got him to restart networking to get a DHCP IP.

In either case, this was a very bad situation since almost all Google said was stuff like "sudo -K" and adjust date/time, su to root that doesn't exist - well, just a lot of stuff that didn't work. The switch terminal trick saved the day this time, but that was really hard to find, and I'm not sure it'll always work?

This isn't the most typical situation, granted, but there needs to be an easier - and documented - way to fix this when it happens. It's pretty easy to fiddle around with say internet settings and suddenly have the date changed behind the back via NTP, it's not always "broken Windows" that is to blame.

At the very least a sudoers user with a valid password should be allowed to reset the timestamp. If this feature is necessary at all...