Chris Read

I’m busy wiring together a new server configuration environment using Windows Deployment Services (don’t ask), Cobbler and Chef. So far things seem to be going quite well, until I bumped in to the following error trying to get a new client to register with the Chef server:

HTTP Request Returned 401 Unauthorized: Failed to authenticate!

A quick sift through Google results didn’t get anything usable. A quick sniff of the packets going over the wire though showed that it was authenticating using a signed certificate. Normally when you sign HTTP requests like that you add some kind of timed expiry. Could the problem be clock related?

Sure enough, a quick check on the new client and the server showed that there was just over an hour time difference. Getting the time on the client and the server in sync got the client registered!