On Mac OS X (such as 10.8 thru 10.11) is there a bundled command-line tool to ask a specific remote NTP time server for the current date-time? I found ntpdc but this queries the ntpd utility which I assume means going through my already-defined NTP servers. I want to make a call outside of my pre-defined NTP servers. Like this imaginary line where -s means server-address: ntpclient -s time.euro.apple.com current

After the recent daylight saving time change, my macOS (Sonoma v14.1.1) clock no longer shows correct date and time. When I enable "Set date and time automatically" it reverts to January 22, 2023 and a wrong time. Therefore, I would like to manually synchronise my computer's clock with a time server. I would like to use Oxford's University time servers. I use sntp command.

sudo sntp -sS ntp1.ox.ac.uk

The command produces five sets of the following output:

sntp: Exchange failed: Timeout
sntp_exchange {
        result: 6 (Timeout)
        header: 00 (li:0 vn:0 mode:0)
       stratum: 00 (0)
          poll: 00 (1)
     precision: 00 (1.000000e+00)
         delay: 0000.0000 (0.000000000)
    dispersion: 0000.0000 (0.000000000)
           ref: 00000000 ("    ")
         t_ref: 00000000.00000000 (0.000000000)
            t1: E8F7357E.A265F0F5 (3908515198.634367999)
            t2: 00000000.00000000 (0.000000000)
            t3: 00000000.00000000 (0.000000000)
            t4: 00000000.00000000 (0.000000000)
        offset: FFFFFFFF8B846540.AECD078580000000 (-1954257599.317183971)
         delay: FFFFFFFF1708CA81.5D9A0F0B00000000 (-3908515198.634367943)
          mean: 0000000000000000.0000000000000000 (0.000000000)
         error: 0000000000000000.0000000000000000 (0.000000000)
          addr: 129.67.1.164
}

and exits with the following error message:

sntp: Clock select failed

My NTP server configuration is located in /private/etc/ntp.conf:

server  ntp0.ox.ac.uk
server  ntp1.ox.ac.uk
server  ntp2.ox.ac.uk
server  ntp3.ox.ac.uk

My questions are: 1) How do I make sure that the sntp command uses the nth.conf file above? At the moment I have to supply the NTP server address manually to the sntp command. 2) What do I need to change for the sntp command to succeed and set the time?

I would like to know what the default settings for OS X are in terms of keeping the clock adjusted when I enable automatic time sync in the Date & Time preference. I do know that the venerable ntpd daemon on Mavericks (10.9) and Yosemite (10.10) is no longer responsible for adjusting the time and instead a new program pacemaker has been introduced — so how can I know things are working or need adjustment to keep time?

Since a few days my MacBook Air 2020 shows the wrong date when set to "Set date and time automatically". This is regardless of the chosen NTP server. When time set manually, querying a NTP server from the command line returns: $ sudo sntp -sS pool.ntp.org -9.789671 +/- 0.018845 pool.ntp.org 95.81.173.74 Which does not show date and time, but also no major offset. The offset is consistent at 5 months, 2 days, 3 hours and 10 minutes. - Tried time.apple.com and pool.ntp.org. No luck. - Tried different time zones. No luck. - Tried VPN to fake a different physical location. No luck. - Changed WiFi networks, including using my phone as hotspot. No luck. - NVRAM reset didn't help. No luck. **Fix** It somehow got fixed when I installed sntp (part of the ntp package) via Homebrew and ran it after running sudo touch /var/db/ntp-kod sudo chown root:wheel /var/db/ntp-kod Note: I don't know if the installation of sntp via Homebrew is needed as macOS also has its own version.

I'm running Ventura 13.4 on an M2 MacBook Air. I run the FT8 and FT4 digital modes for ham radio. FT8/4 requires fairly accurate time synchronization. It seems that macOS gets out of sync when waking up from sleep. (See [Time.apple.com sync](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254749768)) . The solution for better time synchronization is to run chrony, or better, the GUI version, chronyControl. (See [Accurate time keeping on an Apple Mac running macOS Big Sur for FT8, FT4 and WSPR](https://qso365.co.uk/2021/04/accurate-time-keeping-on-an-apple-mac-running-macos-big-sur-for-ft8-ft4-and-wspr/)) This has been working well for me, very well. My clock is very accurate. However, I'm still having time-shift issues. Notice that the [time.is](https://time.is/) website says my time is +-0.001 seconds. But look at the left-hand side, the third column is my time shift compared to others, the rest of the world is about 0.8 seconds off. ![Screenshot of two windows: the left window shows timings for FT8/FT4 while the right window is the current time according to the website time.is ][1] Since it is unlikely that the rest of the world is wrong, I must be wrong. Other hams have steered me to the likely culprit: I have an audio latency issue. The audio setup is simple and fixing it is unlikely. So I'd like to be able to bump my system clock by fractions of a second. (Clearly, I'll have to disable chronyControl when I do this!) Any sort of shell script to read the time and set the time would probably not work well since it would take a fraction of a second to run. I need a better way to do this. How can I bump my system clock by a specified amount?

man timed and "hoakley " says that timed still uses /etc/ntp.conf and I see nothing in the launchd plist that selects that or anything else, so I would think that it is either hard-coded or in some alternate configuration file. Anyway, in 10.13.6, changing it has no effect on what the pref pane says is being used. And the pref pane only allows one of three Apple servers. Changing that has no effect on ntp.conf  Erasing it causes the USA server to be re-entered (without affecting the file). So, is it possible to point it to a different time server? If so, how?

My Catalina weirdly have drifting time, sometimes 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 19 minutes (in 1-2 hours), today it's drifting 40 minutes (in 4 hours). Is there any brew package/daemon that automatically sync the time every for example 5 minutes? already using this, but it's still drifting few minutes I've tried:

crontab -e 
* * * * * sntp -sS sg.pool.ntp.org 
* * * * * sudo sntp -sS sg.pool.ntp.org

but both resulting an error:

sntp 4.2.8p10@1.3728-o Tue Mar 21 14:36:42 UTC 2017 (139~6597)
Can't open KOD db file /var/db/ntp-kod for writing: Permission denied
2021-10-14 09:59:00.339248 (-0700) +9.756839 +/- 6.545621 sg.pool.ntp.org 194.0.5.123 s2 no-leap
step-systime: Operation not permitted

or

sudo: a terminal is required to read the password; either use the -S option to read from standard input or configure an askpass helper
sudo: a password is required

I have a mid 2011 27" iMac running Mavericks (10.9.1). I updated from Mountain Lion this Fall when Mavericks was released. I never had any problem before with my system clock. Since installing Mavericks my clock consistently gains about 20 seconds per day. I have my Time Zone correctly set and "Set Date and Time Automatically" is checked in my Date & Time system preferences. It is set to use "Apple/Americas/U.S. (time.apple.com)" When I open the Date & Time System Preferences pane my clock gets adjusted immediately to the correct time, but without opening the pane, it gets off track pretty quickly. I have rebooted, checked and unchecked the box to set the date and time automatically and neither seems to have helped. Any solutions or ideas? ---------- **UPDATE:** I have made what feels like progress. Question: How can I tell if my mac is keeping the clock updated properly? and its accepted answer by grgarside provided a lot of helpful troubleshooting help. My drift is a whopping 499.988 (gains 43.19 seconds per day)! Most importantly, pacemaker is running every 5 - 15 seconds, as evidenced by my stem log, however, every time it runs it gets an error: Feb 1 11:53:29 jsw.local pacemaker: adjtime: Operation not permitted Feb 1 11:53:39 jsw.local pacemaker: adjtime: Operation not permitted Feb 1 11:53:51 jsw.local pacemaker: adjtime: Operation not permitted Feb 1 11:53:59 jsw.local pacemaker: adjtime: Operation not permitted Feb 1 11:54:09 jsw.local pacemaker: adjtime: Operation not permitted Feb 1 11:54:19 jsw.local pacemaker: adjtime: Operation not permitted It seems I have a permission problem, but I cannot figure it out. I have unloaded and reloaded the pacemaker plsit via launchctl sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.pacemaker.plist sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.pacemaker.plist here is a text export of my com.apple.pacemaker.plist { Label = "com.apple.pacemaker"; ProgramArguments = ( "/usr/libexec/pacemaker", "-b", "-e", "0.0001", "-a", 10, ); KeepAlive = { PathState = { "/private/var/db/ntp.drift" = YES; }; }; } my /private/var/db/ntp.drift file is owned by root:wheel and its permissions are 644, /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.pacemaker.plist has exactly the same ownership and permissions. I hope this update provides enough additional information so that someone can get me past this issue.

I'm seeing 5 processes with network activity ( sending/receiving bytes ). I'm not sure whether these are normal occurrences? List of processes - apsd - ntpd - mDNSResponder - trustd - netbiosd I researched a few of those and some were associated to file sharing via windows or bonjour, however I don't have any other PCs on my network to even begin sharing files with.

I have some raspberry pi computers on a private network which do not have real time clocks and thus cannot keep time accurately after they are shut off. Because they are disconnected from the internet, they cannot use ntp to update their clocks after they sync. However, I can connect my mac to the private network and ask the raspberry pi computers to get the the current time from the mac. When I try doing this, it does not work. The ntpd launchd service is disabled on High Sierra. When I try to start it, this happens. $ sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.ntp.ntpd-legacy.plist Password: /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.ntp.ntpd-legacy.plist: Service is disabled I tried to enable like so, to no avail $ sudo launchctl enable system/org.ntp.ntpd-legacy $ sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.ntp.ntpd-legacy.plist Password: /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.ntp.ntpd-legacy.plist: Service is disabled so I have to start it manually like so: sudo /usr/sbin/ntpd When I test on the pi to see if the ntp sync is working, I get this: pi@jessie:~ $ timedatectl status Local time: Mon 2018-05-07 14:53:03 GMT+7 Universal time: Mon 2018-05-07 21:53:03 UTC RTC time: n/a Time zone: Etc/GMT+7 (GMT+7, -0700) NTP enabled: yes NTP synchronized: no RTC in local TZ: no DST active: n/a Notice that NTP synchronized is set to "no". When I test to see if the times are synchronized, this is the result: $ date; SSHPASS='pass' sshpass -e ssh pi@pi1 date Mon May 7 14:52:23 PDT 2018 Mon May 7 14:52:00 GMT+7 2018 The times are not synchronized. I am uncertain how to debug. It is not clear where the ntpd logs are stored. Ultimately, I just want to be able to start ntpd and have it respond to requests for time.

[I have two not-really-related questions about timed, so I'm asking them separately. The other one is "[timed not always working?](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/364892) ".] I just upgraded to High Sierra (yeah, I'm a bit behind the times), and I just discovered this new system time daemon, timed, which is evidently new with 10.13. Unlike my previous Macs, this machine does not seem to be acting as an NTP server -- that is, it is not accepting incoming NTP connections on port 123, even from the local host. I can see that it uses the configuration file /etc/ntp.conf, and presumably if I put the right lines in there it might do what I want, but I have no way of knowing whether it accepts all the same directives there as ntpd does, so I'm afraid it may be a bit of a crapshoot. Anybody know of an "official" or sanctioned way? Right now ntp.conf consists of the single line server time.apple.com. (At the moment I only care about accepting NTP connections from this machine, but eventually I may also want to accept them from the local network.) P.S. I was thinking there was a chance this might have something to do with firewall settings ("do/don't accept incoming connections"), although now I'm doubting that. At @nohillside's suggestion, I tried fetching time on it (hitting it on NTP port 123) from an outside machine, and that failed, too. (I've confirmed that I *can* fetch time by making NTP connections from this machine to other NTP servers, such as time.apple.com.)

I read that the only way to point an IOS device at your own NTP server is to change your dns sever’s record for time.apple.com to point at your NTP server so that when the iOS device requests the time from the hard-coded time.apple.com it returns that NTP server’s is instead of the one apple returns. Is that true for all versions of iOS and does it work on iPod Touches? Additionally, does it request on port 123 like most NTP clients?

So on macOS High Sierra 10.13, this answer worked fine: How to enable ntpd to server ntp clients (using High Sierra) Now I am running macOS 10.14 and they have removed both ntpdate and ntpd-wrapper (which was what the org.ntp.ntpd-legacy.plist LaunchDaemon was using). **Is there a solution to configure a similar ntp relay with macOS 10.14?** I am using a Mac Pro (Late 2013) which has 2 ethernet NIC's, and have one NIC with internet access, which is syncing to time.apple.com. I need the second NIC that does not have internet access to act as an ntpd server for the devices on the private network segment that does not route outside it's private LAN segment.

In the latest macOS version (Mojave 10.14 Beta) the ntpdate tool has been removed. What I want to do is to simply restart the computer clock using an NTP server: sudo ntpdate -u pool.ntp.org Has Apple published the reasoning behind the removal, and have they replaced it with something else?

How can I make an iOS device a NTP server ? The reason for this is, the network of devices I have don't have internet connection but are connected via Wifi. So just want to create a device as a server and let others to associate themselves to it.

In macOS 10.12.6 , I am trying to forward the clock using the *date* command. E.g.: today's date is 25-09-2017 and I am setting it to 27-09-2017. But using ntp I am unable to revert my system time back to 25-09-2017. I have "time.asia.apple.com" set in /etc/ntp.conf. When I try to issue the command sudo killall -9 ntpd; sudo ntpdate "time.asia.apple.com" I am getting the following output: >27 Sep 20:25:36 ntpdate: no server suitable for synchronization found I am not sure why my system time is not moving back to 25th of Sep. I even tried it with "time1.google.com" . The clock is still not returning back to today's date.

I had updated my old iMac to Mavericks just fine. I then bought a new (certified refurbished, actually) iMac and migrated everything over from a Time Machine backup. The new iMac's clock loses several seconds a day. When I unlock the *Date & Time* system preference, the time then synchronizes to the correct time immediately. But then it just loses time again. I read [this answer](https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/111859/30226) and now have a total of 3 time-servers, but it doesn't seem to solve my problem. In the system.log file, there are these relevant messages: Dec 3 22:31:34 iMac.local ntpd: SYNC state ignoring +0.155735 s Dec 3 22:31:35 iMac.local ntpd: ntpd: time set +0.308737 s Dec 3 22:31:35 iMac.local com.apple.time: Interval maximum value is 946100000 seconds (specified value: 9223372036854775807). The Interval maximum value one doesn't look good. Anybody know how to fix this so that the time stays sync'd? --- Update ====== It took a little while, but the addition of multiple time servers *did* make it better (not perfect, but better). Now it *gains* time, but seemingly at a much slower rate. If the addition of multiple servers (3 in total) had anything to do with making it better, perhaps (?) the addition of yet more servers will make it better still. I now have a total of 5 servers in ntp.conf. I'll watch it over the next couple of days and see what happens. (Even if this fixes it, this still doesn't answer *why* all of this is necessary to fix it in the first place. An answer to *that* would be nice, but I'll settle for it just being fixed at this point.) BTW: you *can* set multiple via the **System Preferences** GUI: just type server names into the field with commas to separate them. This keeps the GUI and the file in sync. BTW #2: [here's the site](http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Servers/WebHome) I got the list of publicly accessible NTP servers from.

I'm using ICMP time stamping on my mid-2013 MacBook Air, and I need my clock to have an accuracy of no worse than 1ms. I see that ntpd is running, with the default settings, and /etc/ntp.conf contains just one line, server time.apple.com, without even any comments. However, if I run ntpdate -d time.apple.com (or ntpdate -d ntp1.yycix.ca, which produces the same offset reading for any given time as time.apple.com farm does), always as a non-root user, I'm often getting the reading that my clock is offset by as much as 6ms, or, most often around 4ms (sometimes 0ms, but very rarely). Why is this happening? I'm not even rebooting my MacBook, it runs 24/7, plugged in, why is its ntpd not keeping the time correctly? Syslog has the following: % syslog | fgrep ntp | fgrep -v sudo | tail Nov 19 12:59:30 mba.cnst ntpd : proto: precision = 1.000 usec Last I checked, 1.000 usec is no worse than 1 us, which is 0.001ms, or 0.000001s; why does it claim that precision is 0.001ms, when in reality the clock is offset by as much as 6ms?

Using sntp to query an NTP server times out after just 15 sec. Stevens-MacBook-Air:~ Steve$ sntp -d time.nist.gov Starting to read KoD file /var/db/ntp-kod... sntp sendpkt: Sending packet to 2610:20:6f15:15::27... Packet sent. sntp recvdata: select() reached timeout (15 sec), aborting. sntp recvpkt failed: -1. Server unusable on_wire failed for server 2610:20:6f15:15::27! sntp sendpkt: Sending packet to 216.229.0.179... Packet sent. sntp recvdata: select() reached timeout (15 sec), aborting. sntp recvpkt failed: -1. Server unusable on_wire failed for server 216.229.0.179! According to sntp documentation and man page for sntp, default is supposed to be 68 seconds. Is this a bug sntp installed in OS 10.11.6?

my friend broke his iPhone 4S digitizer in very unhappy way. He didn't have **backup** or **synced computers** and he had **cellular data turn off**. I successfully replaced digitizer and turn on the iPhone. Whow! ***Your iPhone is disabled for 47 years***. Okay, so normally after battery replacement iPhone time is flushed and after reboot new time is fetched over NTP via cellular data, synced PC or already signed Wi-Fi. Not working in this case.. So theoretically there are two possible solutions: 1. Somehow fetch or rewrite correct clock's value 2. Mount NAND flash drive, export keys from CPU, merge it with passcode, decrypt data Any advice or experiences? Thanks!