A systems administrator is investigating multiple concurrent issues on a critical application server. Users report intermittent authentication failures when accessing a web application. Automated monitoring tools are flagging SSL certificate validation errors from the server's management interface. Concurrently, scheduled backup jobs that write to a network share are failing with "access denied" errors. While reviewing the server's system logs, the administrator notices that the timestamps on new entries are several hours ahead of the actual time. Which of the following is the MOST likely common cause for all these reported issues?
The correct answer is system clock skew. This is the most likely common cause because several critical network services rely on synchronized time.
Authentication Failures: Protocols like Kerberos, which are commonly used for network authentication (including application and file share access), are highly sensitive to time differences. If the clock skew between the client, server, and domain controller exceeds a few minutes (typically 5 minutes by default), authentication requests will be rejected.
SSL Certificate Errors: SSL/TLS certificates are valid only for a specific time range (between a 'not Before' and 'not After' date). If the server's system clock is outside of this range, it will consider valid certificates to be invalid, causing validation errors.
Log Timestamps: The incorrect timestamps in the logs are a direct symptom of the server's clock being wrong.
Incorrect firewall rules, an expired SSL certificate, or a failing RAID controller battery would not collectively explain all the observed symptoms. An expired certificate would only explain the SSL error, and a firewall or RAID issue would not account for the time-related authentication and certificate problems.