[RPi4] NTP Problem

    Hi. New to LE. Moving from OSMC. I installed the latest stable LE (2025.11) to a brand-new fast and large SD card to use with my 2G Rpi 4. This issue with time not setting correctly is a real problem though and not a great introduction to the product, sadly.

    It took me hrs of searching and troubleshooting yesterday to realize why my device had no internet. Now I've...

    - Set the KODI 'Regional' settings to my proper 'Timezone country' and 'Timezone'
    - Turned on the 'Wait for network before starting KODI' LE option with a 'Maximum Wait Time (Sec.)' of two (2) minutes (120 secs)
    - Added three (3) NTP Servers in LE settings (ncnoc.ncren.net, time.nist.gov, time.google.com). The first is here in my state. Can't get much closer to me. :)

    ...and the thing still only gets the proper time on reboot maybe 50% of the time!

    It's really frustrating to say the least and with all the complaints going back more than 10 years I'm frankly amazed nothing's ever been done in the product to resolve this. Maybe there's nothing that *can* be done? The suggestion to add an RTC to the RPi feels like a cop-out as well (found that multiple times).

    I suppose there might be some sort of startup script that could help, but Ive never found one in all the threads I discovered around this. Does anyone have anything that works, 100% of the time, or any other constructive suggestions (besides getting an RTC or just going back to OSMC)?

    I really want to join this cool kids club with y'all, but this is souring my milk boys, to say the least. Appreciate any and all help.

    Oh, forgot to mention: this is hard-wired. Not using wi-fi. Also, exact same devices and hardware work fine with OSMC and rPi OS. I just swapped the SD cards and made no other changes. This is not a hardware issue on the Pis or with my cables or my network.

    Pick a current LE13 nightly and set the timezone in the LE settings addon (as it moved from Kodi in K22); not that timezone has anything to do with NTP and set wait for network. There is no need to set manual NTP servers unless your network or ISP blocks the ntp.org servers that we default to. “Nothing has been done” about NTP issues because there aren’t any issues to do anything about. NTP works fine for 99.999999% of users; the odd problem with ISP blocks or weird routers is seen but that’s all, and a rare event. Yes there are odd posts in the forum, but over a large userbase (and 80% RPi boards) that’s just statistics.

    Thanks for the help. I put LibreElec Version 13 nightly from 2026-AUG-05 on my 2G Pi4 and set the time zone during the boot up wizard. Time is off by over 4hrs and DATE is off by just under 2 weeks. It thinks it's AUG 18. :(

    I have a pfSense device on my network acting as an NTP server. I know it's working because I set my Win 11 PC to use it and then checked the results (w32tm /config /manualpeerlist...., /query /source, and /query /status) but setting the same IP in the KODI LibreELEC settings (Network\NTP servers) doesn't change anything after a device reboot. Is there anything else I can do to force LibreELEC to use 10.0.0.1 for NTP? SSH commands or file modifications, perhaps? I should think this would eliminate ISP (ATT Fiber) as the issue since LibreELEC wouldn't even leave the house for NTP, presumably. :)

    ACK! I just found the method to set my ethernet connection to manual instead of DHCP in the LibreELEC KODI settings, and that has an NTP Servers section too. I changed to manual, set the NTP there to 10.0.0.1 and saved. All fixed!

    Should the Kodi>LibreELEC>Network>NTP Servers values override every other, including DHCP? Doesn't seem so.

    Code
    # List of Fallback timeservers separated by ",".
# These timeservers are used for NTP sync when there are
# no timeservers set by the user or by the service, and
# when UseGatewaysAsTimeservers = false. These can contain
# mixed combination of fully qualified domain names, IPv4
# and IPv6 addresses.
FallbackTimeservers = 0.pool.ntp.org,1.pool.ntp.org,2.pool.ntp.org,3.pool.ntp.org

    This is our default config ^ and we don't set UseGatewaysAsTimeservers anywhere in /etc/connman/main.conf

    On boot (cold or warm) the initial datetime value in the kernel on any device with no RTC chip starts from the libc release date. Once the network is up and NTP runs the initial datetime value is corrected. This approach works fine unless something either blocks or manipulates NTP requests. Most consumer routers with a firewall don't support NTP in the DHCP scope, but pfsense has a deeper featureset and might be setting itself as an NTP source which would override defaults. When you set entries in the LE settings add-on you customise the defaults, but defaults will still be overridden by anything received in the DHCP scope.

    Check the clock on the pfsense box; if this is incorrect (has drifted) it would result in propagation of wrong datetime via DHCP and that might explain future dates appearing. It's also possible that pfsense intercepts and responds to NTP requests traversing the firewall regardless of what you configure locally; except for the manual IP configuration use-case where you explicitly tell ConnMan to use a local subnet source; and since DHCP is not used it is not overridden through the scope.

    ConnMan events (sources, corrections, etc.) should all be logged and visible in the systemd journal.

    NB: The only way to guarantee correct time from the start of boot with an RPi board that has no RTC chip; is adding an RTC chip. As those are cheap and simple to add it's always a valid answer for some people's use-cases (esp. with offline usage).