I came across an issue today that related to installation of the vShield 5.1.1 management appliance with the VMWare SSO Lookup service.
If you get the folowing error:
Initialization of Admin Registration Service Provider failed.
Root Cause: Server returned ‘request expired’ less than 0 seconds after request was issued, but it shouldn’t have expired for at least 600 seconds.
Then the issue is likely to be that the server the SSO component is installed on is out of sync time-wise with the vShield manager. This was evident in my environment due to the differences between BST and UTC timezones that were set on the two servers respectively.
In the end I set the vShield managers time to UTC properly and reboot.
set clock 09:00:00 05 08 2013 (when it was 10am BST)
reboot
This allowed me to join the vShield manager to SSO successfully.
You are awesome… my time was off on one of my esxi servers in my home lab; vshield appliance gets its time from the esxi. updated my esxi time to the correct time. ran a “show clock” on the vshield console to confirm the updated time. success
I appreciated how this post connected the small details of the experiment to the larger questions scientists are trying to answer. It’s a good reminder that progress often comes less from one dramatic breakthrough than from patiently testing, revising, and building on what came before.