It appears that pfSense 2.3 and earlier on nanoBSD does not retain its
system clock calibration between reboots.
On certain (certified) systems, this appears to trigger a sequence in
which the offset gets further and further behind, and NTPD tries in vain
to slew the clock, increasing the drift (freq) value until it exceeds
500, at which point the NTP server gives up, and advertises stratum 16.
Said system is able to function as a reliable time server if I manually
step the clock after the system has booted up. Eventually it will
re-calculate its drift
Poking around, I see that pfSense on nanoBSD writes NTP drift value to
/var/db/ntpd.drift
which is mounted to ramdisk /dev/md1,
Obviously not retained in the case of an abend, but notably ALSO not
retained during a normal reboot. Is there a strategic reason this
hard-won calibration is not retained?
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