NTPD does not sync your clock on OpenBSD
Posted on 2023-12-09 22:48:00 from Vincent in OpenBSD
The clock of your OpenBSD machine is managed by NTPD. But in some cases this is not sufficient
Your clock is not adapted
On OpenBSD machine the NTP daemon is automatically started at boot time. But, if you are in a situation where you clock is not correct, amongst reasons this could be because the offset is too big.
Indeed, even your ntpd is running it could be that the clock is not correct.
You can check the situation via the command ntpctl.
Check situation
Here after we see that there is a big offset of about 1 hour. Too big to be corrected by NTPD.
obsd:~ $ ntpctl -s all
4/5 peers valid, constraint offset -3495s, clock unsynced, clock offset is -3494889.996ms
peer
wt tl st next poll offset delay jitter
162.159.200.123 time.cloudflare.com
1 2 - 244s 300s ---- peer not valid ----
162.159.200.123 from pool pool.ntp.org
1 10 3 27s 31s 8.088ms 28.701ms 41.202ms
45.87.77.15 from pool pool.ntp.org
1 10 2 3s 34s 15.892ms 43.115ms 49.224ms
162.159.200.1 from pool pool.ntp.org
1 10 3 13s 33s 7.938ms 29.292ms 31.525ms
109.68.160.220 from pool pool.ntp.org
1 10 2 15s 32s 9.749ms 28.183ms 30.454ms
Manual correction
The best tool to correct the date and time manually is rdate by doing the following command:
obsd:~ $ doas rdate -ncv pool.ntp.org
After the command your clock should be at the correct timing. You can verify it via the ntpctl command:
obsd:~ $ ntpctl -s all
5/5 peers valid, constraint offset -1s, clock synced, stratum 3
peer
wt tl st next poll offset delay jitter
162.159.200.123 time.cloudflare.com
1 10 3 258s 525s 0.090ms 13.641ms 2.512ms
45.87.78.35 from pool pool.ntp.org
* 1 10 2 130s 543s 13.650ms 40.057ms 52.079ms
109.68.160.220 from pool pool.ntp.org
1 10 2 47s 543s 1.723ms 15.618ms 5.734ms
162.159.200.1 from pool pool.ntp.org
1 10 3 343s 522s 0.003ms 14.646ms 4.317ms
162.159.200.123 from pool pool.ntp.org
1 10 3 1581s 1600s 0.900ms 14.961ms 4.536ms
The list of peers could be different in your case. This depends on what you have in your /etc/ntpd.conf file
Conclusion
In case you motherboard battery is dying, a new bios setup, ... you could have clock with a too far offset. In such case ntpd will not be able to correct it.
Do not trust at 100% ntpd ;)
Verify your clock after modifications on your motherboard or in your bios.