My organization is dusting off some old Raspberry Pi 3 B's and I have been tasked with getting the newest OS on their SDs and getting them up and running. I've been having a problem with getting their system clocks to sync whenever they're booted up however, always picking up right from where they left off without checking in with an external server (I went into timesyncd.conf and have the NTP address set to time.nist.gov) but nothing, the device can't even receive a ping back from google.com when I try to. However, I can open up the web browser and surf no problem. I've tried installing ntpd and chrony instead of systemd-timesyncd but didn't have any luck their either. The ntp service under timedatectl says it's active but, whenever I use systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service the status reads as "idle." and all attempts to reach out to time.nist.gov time out waiting for reply (same with time.google.com). I've disabled ipv6 because I saw on a thread on this kind of issue that that may have something to do with this, as well as extending the RootDistanceMaxSec because I also saw that this helped some other users as well. I have a command to set the clock with sudo date -s "$(wget -qSO- --max-redirect=0 google.com 2>&1 | grep Date: | cut -d' ' -f5-8)Z" and I am able to up arrow to it and run it whenever I turn on the device but I don't want to have to do this every time I boot it up (not to mention the other 4 RPi's we have as well). Is there something that I'm missing to be able to have this device sync its clock on boot?
I've never touched a Raspberry Pi before this so I wouldn't be surprised if I did but I wanted to reach out to learn more and perhaps get some good insight on what I'm doing wrong.
I've never touched a Raspberry Pi before this so I wouldn't be surprised if I did but I wanted to reach out to learn more and perhaps get some good insight on what I'm doing wrong.
Statistics: Posted by CChaye — Mon Jul 21, 2025 8:08 pm