Exchange stops working after changing System Time

Question

I am currently in a situation where the system time of my windows machine differs 6 hours from the actual local time. I tried chaning the system time of my windows machine 6 hours back to match the actual local time.

The issue is, when the system time is changed, Exchange stops working as it wont start anymore. When i change the time back Exchange works again.

Here is the error that it shows when im trying to open the management console after changing the system time.

The Follwing error occured while attempting to connect to the specified server "servername".

The attempt to connect to http://servername/PowerShell using "Kerberos" authentication failed: Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message: Access is denied. For more information, see the about_remote_troubleshooting Help topic.

Any Solutions to this problem?

Answer 1

The closest I've seen to this before was in an Active Directory domain; if your system clock is too far off, the clients connected to the domain won't authenticate because Kerberos acts like they're attackers on the network.

If you are in an AD domain check the clocks on your domain controllers and see how far they're off. Manipulating the time on AD systems can be problematic if you get them out of sync, though, so if that is a problem you'll want to be careful what you do next to get them correctly set.

(I haven't had to adjust DC clocks, so there may be nothing really involved; but if you get them out of sync with each other I know there can be problems, so it's something to keep in mind. I've only had to deal with clock skew from clients preventing logins.)