up vote 43 down vote favorite
14

The Raspberry Pi lacks a hardware clock. How do I force NTPD to update date/time immediately after every boot?

I'm running Raspbian and the Raspberry Pi is connected using an Ethernet cable.

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Mine already does that out of the box. What disto are you using? – Gerben Jul 1 '13 at 12:05
    
Raspbian Wheezy – Alessandro Da Rugna Jul 1 '13 at 13:16
    
works as it is, somehow – lenik Jul 1 '13 at 13:57
    
You need Internet connectivity for ntpd to have servers to ask. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Aug 2 '13 at 18:44
1  
@Thorb Pi is connected with ethernet cable / dhcp. It simply does not get a valid date after booting, it takes a while (10 to 45 minutes) – Alessandro Da Rugna Aug 5 '13 at 7:31
up vote 28 down vote

Do an apt-get install ntpdate .

ntpdate will run when an ethernet interface is brought up, and set the time from an ntp server (see /etc/default/ntpdate).

If ntpd is running, ntpdate will do nothing, however ntpdate will run prior to ntpd at bootup - so this should work out to set the time at bootup as long as there's an ethernet connection.

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stock Raspbian will have all this already. – scruss Jul 4 '13 at 1:27
7  
@scruss mine didn't. (2013-02-09 wheezy rasbian) – Pete Kirkham Feb 23 '14 at 14:14
1  
Mine also did not, had to do it manually. – vaindil Feb 28 '15 at 21:31
    
If it is set up correctly it will do it automatically - although it may take a few minutes. – SDsolar Oct 21 '17 at 20:24
up vote 23 down vote

If your clock is way off, you may need to force ntp to sync by doing:

sudo /etc/init.d/ntp stop
sudo ntpd -q -g
sudo /etc/init.d/ntp start
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1  
It returns error "sudo: ntpd: command not found" – Pygmalion May 18 '16 at 9:10
1  
ntpd must be installed to use the command – thaspius May 18 '16 at 19:24
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It is installed, I am not that ignorant :) – Pygmalion May 18 '16 at 20:04
    
Could you please visit raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/47542/… ? I have posted details there. – Pygmalion May 18 '16 at 20:05
3  
This was absolutely the solution to my problem, but I found it to be temporary until I rebooted. Eventually I caught an error in the shutdown that it couldn't update the hwclock because the hw clock had a future date (no idea how that happened). But the solution was a hwclock update force. That forced the update to the fake hardware clock and then on boot the time was at least close to the current so ntp could do it's job normally. – Piwaf Sep 20 '16 at 18:36
up vote 10 down vote

If you set the Time Zone in raspi-config the Raspberry Pi will automatically update the time on boot, if connected to the internet.

  1. sudo raspi-config
  2. Select Internationalisation Options
  3. Select I2 Change Timezone
  4. Select your Geographical Area
  5. Select your nearest City
  6. Select Finish
  7. Select Yes to reboot now
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this worked well for me – AlexG Feb 17 '17 at 6:41
up vote 9 down vote

It should already be updating the time. The NTPD server should start just after the swap file and before SSHD.

Check your /etc/ntp.conf file to make sure it is configured.

It should list at least one server. I use time.nrc.ca for my server.

Manual page for ntp.conf is here: http://linux.die.net/man/5/ntp.conf

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up vote 9 down vote

See forum post Time does not sync on Pi 3 and with official dongle.

ntpd emits IP/UDP packets with the ToS field set to 0xc0. So that is quite similar to the other issue I (and many others) have with Raspberry Pi3 when operated over a Wi-Fi internal interface.

As a workaround, add the command

/sbin/iptables -t mangle -I POSTROUTING 1 -o wlan0 -p udp --dport 123 -j TOS --set-tos 0x00

to the file

/etc/rc.local

before the exit 0 line. Next, reboot and check.

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1  
I had the same issue as Iinstalled the RPi3 I got for XMas,and you solved my problem. Great !!! – jfmessier Dec 27 '16 at 1:49
up vote 8 down vote

After searching around, this method worked for me. As you know, the Raspberry Pi 3 has NTP disabled by default. So by just typing this, the NTP support will be enabled:

sudo timedatectl set-ntp True

Check result with timedatectl status

In case of warning, you may have to run sudo timedatectl set-local-rtc true too.

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Thanks, this finally helped me out, and seems to be the proper way, despite previous answers. – CharlieS Jun 30 '17 at 1:12
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That is the best answer, helped me a lot. You can use 'sudo' to avoid typing your password (useful for scripts that run it). What is the purpose of the seconds command? set-local-rtc – Arad Nov 29 '17 at 13:38
up vote 3 down vote

My son's Rasberry Pi would not update the time out of the box and after trying all the suggestions above I could get it to update manually but not automatically. Finally after looking elsewhere as well without success, I found that the ntp.conf file that came with the Rasberry Pi had the following lines commented out:

#restrict 127.0.0.1
#restrict ::1

I used

sudo nano /etc/ntp.conf

in the terminal to edit the ntp conf file to now be: 

# Local users may interrogate the ntp server more closely. 
restrict 127.0.0.1
restrict ::1

That solved the problem for us. It updates with both the WiFi and the ethernet cable. I don't know if it would update with WiFi without the change to rc.local suggested above, as by the time I found the solution above I had already made that change and I have not undone it.

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up vote 1 down vote

I found the timedatectl application to help me when I was having a similar issue. It's installed by default and '--help' gives a pretty good and simple overview of how to use the tool.

Note: make sure your timezone is set properly, which this tool can do as well.

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