For local development, I’m using the Kubernetes that is included in Docker Desktop for Windows.  Recently, I was playing around with the Dapr framework inside Kubernetes.  I used the Dapr sidecar to connect to Azure Blob Storage (output binding) and Azure Table Storage (state store).  What worked the day before, suddenly stopped working.  And I really had no idea why…

The problem

While initializing the Azure Table Storage state store, Dapr threw this exception:  Server failed to authenticate the request. Make sure the value of Authorization header is formed correctly including the signature.  No more details.  During troubleshooting, I also validated if the authentication against Azure Blob Storage worked fine, because they use the same storage account.  This time, I got the same runtime exception, with an extra detail: Request date header too old: ‘Mon, 08 Jun 2020 12:15:14 GMT.

The reason

Azure Storage compares the datetime inside the request with its own clock.  If the time is drifting more than 15 minutes, this authentication exception is thrown.  I compared the timestamp of the logs with the local time on my host machine.  There was a big time difference, the clocks were not in sync.  Apparently, the problem was related to Windows hibernation.  When my laptop is put to sleep, the underlying Docker VM inside Hyper-V gets also hibernated.  As a consequence, time synchronization doesn’t work anymore.  The problem is described over here.

The solution

This blog gave me the solution.  Disabling and enabling the Hyper-V time synchronization feature solves it!  This can be done via this PowerShell script:

$vm = Get-VM -Name DockerDesktopVM
$feature = "Time Synchronization"
Disable-VMIntegrationService -vm $vm -Name $feature
Enable-VMIntegrationService -vm $vm -Name $feature

I hope this saves you some troubleshooting time!
Cheers,
Toon