A while back I setup a  to create backups and store them on Amazon S3. Until recently, this has worked great. The script kept bombing with the following error when it actually tried to connect to S3 to upload the backup:

I'm not sure the reason why this happens (it may have something to do with the fact that the server in question is running as a virtual machine) but after some digging I realized the server I'm attempting to do the backup from had an inaccurate date.

To fix this you can run something like the following from the command prompt:

shane@ubuntu-ci:~/s3sync$ sudo ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com [sudo] password for shane:22 Aug 14:46:49 ntpdate[6296]: step time server 91.189.94.4 offset 2584.662208 sec