Dear Maintainer,

(tagged as 'upstream' because I find it unlikely that the issue is
Debian-specific; I'm not 100% certain, though.)

I have a Chromebook (specifically, an Acer C720) that I have loaded with
Stretch. The RTC is powered by the main system battery, rather than a
dedicated coin cell.  As a result, if the battery dies, the RTC data will
become corrupt and read a quasi-random time at the next boot.  Due to the
nature of Chromebooks, I expect this occurs with the expectation that the
issue will self-correct as soon as the user goes online and NTP syncs.

However, with Stretch installed, we have a bootstrapping problem: If the
system clock is too far in the future (I suspect a 2038 bug), dhclient
errors while acquiring the lease, preventing it from going online, thus
preventing an NTP sync to fix the clock.

I have reproduced this problem three times.  The first two involved a dead
battery.  The third was a repro with the latest version (4.3.3-5) using

	sudo date -s 'Sat Jun  4 10:38:14 EDT 2135'

then telling NetworkManager to disconnect and reconnect to my wireless network.


Here is an excerpt of the relevant details from the last:

stevie@ikaros:~$ date
Sat Jun  4 10:38:14 EDT 2135
stevie@ikaros:~$ less /var/log/daemon.log

Jun  4 10:38:27 ikaros dhclient[2113]: DHCPDISCOVER on wlp1s0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3
Jun  4 10:38:27 ikaros dhclient[2113]: Unable to set up timer: out of range
Jun  4 10:38:27 ikaros dhclient[2113]:
Jun  4 10:38:27 ikaros dhclient[2113]: If you think you have received this message due to a bug rather
Jun  4 10:38:27 ikaros dhclient[2113]: than a configuration issue please read the section on submitting
Jun  4 10:38:27 ikaros dhclient[2113]: bugs on either our web page at www.isc.org or in the README file
Jun  4 10:38:27 ikaros dhclient[2113]: before submitting a bug.  These pages explain the proper
Jun  4 10:38:27 ikaros dhclient[2113]: process and the information we find helpful for debugging..
Jun  4 10:38:27 ikaros dhclient[2113]:
Jun  4 10:38:27 ikaros dhclient[2113]: exiting.


As soon as I did

	sudo date -s '2015-10-14'

then my network connection came right up and I was able to submit this bug report.

I just had the exact same problem, so this issue still exist. It was
especially confusing that NetworkManager indicated that the connection
to the network was successful, despite the fact that dhclient had
failed.

One simple idea to improve things would be to point out in dhclient's
error message that the problem may be related to the system clock. That
way, at least calling dhclient manually may put the user on the right
track.

Dear submitter,

as the package isc-dhcp has just been removed from the Debian archive
unstable we hereby close the associated bug reports.  We are sorry
that we couldn't deal with your issue properly.

For details on the removal, please see https://bugs.debian.org/1143544

The version of this package that was in Debian prior to this removal
can still be found using https://snapshot.debian.org/.

Please note that the changes have been done on the master archive and
will not propagate to any mirrors until the next dinstall run at the
earliest.

This message was generated automatically; if you believe that there is
a problem with it please contact the archive administrators by mailing
ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Thorsten Alteholz (the ftpmaster behind the curtain)