When booting, the system sticks at a warning

Starting sendmail: make: Warning: File 'sendmail.cf'has modification time 2.3e+04 s in the future
make: warning: Clock skew detected. Your build may be incomplete.

System just sits here for a good 20min spinning it's wheels. Don;t see any resource usage or network traffic on the virtual machine, it doing nothing as far as I can tell. It eventually moves on to "Starting sm-client:" and sits there for a about 10minutes before completing the boot process.

Never worked with Oracle Enterprise Linux before and I am in the process of creating templates in vSphere with a group of developers who need the vm's to develop an application on. The VM specs chosen by the devs is OEL 5.3 with no update subscription (so it is just fresh off the install CD) with 2 cpu, 16GB of ram, 40GB vmdk (100mb /boot, 8gb /tmp, 16gb swap, remaining space to /). The system was built with no IP information entered (this is prep for a template). At first, things seemed fine with the system. VMTools installed with out issue and all things worked with the exception of network. I setup the VM with a DHCP setup, and the vlan the vm is attached to does not offer DHCP. During the install I did input the fqdn of the two internal NTP servers, though I did get the error that they could not be reached since no IP address was provided to the system.

Before I found out the devs do not have a subscription for updates, I put in a static IP address on the nic so I can download current updates. I put in the IP address info and DNS info. After doing this and restarting the vm, I ran into this clock skew, hang around and wait issue.

For my time configuration, my ESXi servers are set to UTC time in the BIOS, and ESX servers are in the PST time zone. The VM I normally do not alter the VM bios and let it stay with the default PST time it gets from ESX. The OEL setup is configured to use local time to match what the BIOS is set to.

In searching, I can not find much reference to this machine other than configuring NTP server, which I have. But none of the info I do find references anything to this huge boot delay I am getting.

Does anyone know why I get such a large boot delay? or where I can look to figure this out?

thank you

Egghhh...

Unfortunately this kind of thing happens from time to time in vSphere. My ESX box sitting under my desk is now so far out of time, it won't even sync with ntpdate, even though it was set to run a regular sync with my NTP servers. You could create a new VM and build it... but honestly just sync it once with ntpdate and quickly make your template. After you deploy your templates, make sure you set the boxes to sync with an NTP source and off you go.

_O_

Provogeek,

Did you try 0rwell's suggestion?

Did it work?


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