getting correct time when rpi boots up freebsd

Never heard of DNS being time-dependent. If you ask it to look up a hostname, it should return whatever result is current.

One way to resolve the Raspberry Pi's lack of a clock is to add one. Cheap DS1307 boards with a battery that are designed to plug into the GPIO header are under $10. You could spend a little more to get a more precise chip, or a bit more still (though still under $100) to add a GPS receiver so you can build your own stratum-0 time source.

I can't reproduce this on another system. No idea what's been going on, and can only assume something else was going on as well.

Now there you've jogged my memory. I've just pulled from an older pi a ds3231 I bought several years ago and forgot about. Seems to have battery backup on it. Only trouble there's a heatsink in the way..... frustrating.

As I've noted elsewhere, data from gpsd isn't reliable on the pi.

On 22/04/2022 08:36, Mike Scott wrote: .....

Just to note that after upgrading to gpsd-3.23.1, gpsd now seems to work correctly: ntpd is very happy to sync to an nmea source in priority to the internet servers.

Thanks all for input.