Rubenerd

Creating a new FreeBSD Xen template at work, I was given the all too familiar error message:

ntpd[1037]: time correction of -39583 seconds exceeds sanity
limit (1000); set clock manually to the correct UTC time.

This despite setting the time to UTC and the local timezone in bsdinstall moments earlier.

The solution is to set the time manually. Even if its slightly off, it will
be within the allowed drift of NTP, which will let it correct it:

# date 1654

I’ll have to ask the other engineers how much of an issue time drift is to VMs. From my own client experience, it can be a hugely thorny issue.