Articles: PHPBB Flood Error Fix and RC.LOCAL the Linux Version of the Startup Folder/Autoexec.bat

A Linux server, running CentOS 5 and hosting one of our PHPBB forum sites had to be rebooted last night. Afterward no one could post anymore because everyone was getting the following error message:

"You cannot make another post so soon after your last; please try again in a short while."

I did a scan on the MySQL database and everything checked out fine, so I looked in the file "functions_post.php" (I'm using PHPBB2, BTW) and determined that it was a time issue. Running "date" on the command line showed that the time was set back to 2008- yikes!

I ran:

  /usr/sbin/ntpdate time.nist.gov

to syncronize and fix the time and the flood error went away right after that.

To prevent the problem in the future, I edited the /etc/rc.local. In some systems it may be /etc/rc.d/rc.local, in fact my was an alias pointing to that file. The rc.local file is pretty much the Windows equivalent of the Startup folder and the DOS equivalent of Autoexec.bat.

Anyways I edited the file so that it has the line "/usr/sbin/ntpdate time.nist.gov" in it, so that in the future if the server was ever rebooted again it would synchronize the time upon boot up- just in case something screwy happens to the system clock of the server again, and you might want to also.

[update] You may want to, in lieu of time.nist.gov, use a better time server that I have been using lately- it is pool.ntp.org. It uses a cluster of time servers and is more reliable.