I have a VPS running Debian 11 and it serves a web app that uses Clerk for authentication. I kept running in to an issue where I couldn't log in properly and saw this in the logs:
2025-04-15T10:29:39.979504379Z Clerk: unable to resolve handshake: [Error: JWT cannot be used prior to not before date claim (nbf). Not before date: Tue, 15 Apr 2025 14:23:16 GMT; Current date: Tue, 15 Apr 2025 10:29:39 GMT;] {
2025-04-15T10:29:39.979535958Z reason: 'token-not-active-yet',
2025-04-15T10:29:39.979539899Z action: undefined
2025-04-15T10:29:39.979543109Z }
I tried everything and for the life of me could not get the VPS time to sync.
This isn't the cleanest option and I'd really only recommend it if nothing else works out for you.
sudo date -s "$(curl -s --head http://google.com | grep ^Date: | sed 's/Date: //g')"
curl -s --head http://google.com
-
curl: A tool to transfer data from or to a server -
-s: Silent mode (doesn't show progress or error messages) -
--head: Fetch only the HTTP headers, not the content of the webpage.
This sends a HEAD request to Google's server, which responds with HTTP headers that include the current date and time
grep ^Date:
-
grep: A command to search for patterns in text -
^Date:: Searches for lines that begin with "Date:".
This extracts only the header line that contains the timestamp from Google's servers
sed 's/Date: //g'
-
sed: Stream editor for filtering and transforming text -
's/Date: //g': A substitution command that replaces "Date: " with nothing, effectively removing it.
This cleans up the output, leaving only the actual date and time string
$()
Command substitution- executes the commands inside and replaces itself with their output.
The result of the curl+grep+sed commands becomes the argument for the date command
sudo date -s
-
sudo: Execute command as superuser -
date: Command to display or set the system date and time -
-s: Set system time to the string provided as an argument
I have a feeling there will be some "slippage" on this server and I'll have to re-do this eventually, but i guess only time will tell...