When i was learning chef server, i heard  Hosted Chef Server is the best of getting started so i registered for one.

Every thing was good except i got , " Failed to authenticate as geekinlinux . Synchronize the clock on your host. hosted chef "  error while i was trying to list clients using knife plugin.

My chef is a hosted one sitting somewhere in the world and i was sitting somewhere else, i didn't figure out how to sync the time.

but some how i realised some thing and guessed it could be issue with hostname so i tried "hostname -f"
but it was giving error some thing like service not recogined, reason was i changed the hostname and restart was pending. So i restarted my vm and and it worked well.

Strange thing was out of curiousity i tried stopping hostname service and hit "knife client list" but it was working, so it could be some other issue not only hostname issue.

My conclusion is simply restart your vm or machine when you get this error.

gil ...