FreeBSD 15: chronyd not syncing and clock drift increasing

📖 ~1 min read

Table of contents

1. Symptom & Impact
2. Environment & Reproduction
3. Root Cause Analysis
4. Quick Triage
5. Step-by-Step Diagnosis
6. Solution – Primary Fix
7. Solution – Alternative Approaches
8. Verification & Acceptance Criteria
9. Rollback Plan
10. Prevention & Hardening
11. Related Errors & Cross-Refs
12. References & Further Reading

Symptom & Impact

Clock drift grows, causing TLS failures, scheduler offsets, and inconsistent distributed logging timelines.

Environment & Reproduction

Seen when NTP egress is filtered, sources are unreachable, or time services conflict.

Root Cause Analysis

Chrony cannot maintain trustworthy upstreams due to network policy or source quality issues.

Quick Triage

Check service status, source reachability, and whether another daemon is controlling system time.

Step-by-Step Diagnosis

Inspect chrony source statistics, offset history, and firewall path for NTP traffic.

Solution – Primary Fix

Correct source configuration, permit required traffic, and reinitialize synchronization baseline.

Solution – Alternative Approaches

Use internal stratum servers or fallback to ntpd with equivalent policy controls.

Verification & Acceptance Criteria

Offset stabilizes within policy threshold and chrony reports synchronized state consistently.

Rollback Plan

Restore previous time daemon configuration and known-good source list from version control.

Prevention & Hardening

Implement time drift monitoring, multi-source redundancy, and change control on NTP policy.

Related Errors & Cross-Refs

Associated with certificate validation errors and Kerberos or token expiry anomalies.

Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for freebsd-15.

View all freebsd-15 tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →

Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.

References & Further Reading

chrony documentation, FreeBSD handbook time services section, and NTP best practices.