ntpd configutration -- a small suggestion from the peanut gallery

[John Johnstone]

On 6/5/19 3:42 PM, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> 
> In message <58688a77362d7caad70df844d5077d0916f7f944.camel at smormegpa.no>,
> Matthias Oestreicher <matthias at smormegpa.no> wrote:
> 
>>> Did I just miss those ntpd death messages somehow?
>> Sorry, I've never seen ntpd exit due to too big offset and I don't know how that would
>> show in /var/log/messages.
> 
> It would appear that, most probably, nobody knows what the ntpd suicide log
> messages look like, because it doesn't actually produce any (contrary to
> what the man page says).

On recent FreeBSD versions I've seen it just silently fail to start and 
stay running.

After powering up several HP ProLiants and setting the hardware clocks 
to local time before booting a FreeBSD 12 installation USB drive, I've 
answered No to the "CMOS clock set to UTC?" question.  After picking a 
timezone and finishing the installation, the system completes it's first 
boot up but NTP is not running.  Observed by service ntpd status as well 
as a ntpq -c sysinfo.

Doing a date shows the system time set to be UTC even though it's 
configured for a local timezone.  Manually setting the system's clock 
with date and starting NTP gets NTP running and synchronized after that.

-
John J.