Problem Description
I experienced an extended power outage; after the power was restored and the freedombox powered on, I ran the diagnostics app and found the time is now out of sync. After running the timedatectl command several times, I found the local/universal time and the rtc time are drifting apart. Note the difference in time goes from 8 min 10 sec to 8 min 36 sec.
Information
RTC will frequently keep poor time and drift. If this is a concern use NTP. I believe FB is using SNTP (not NTP) which is usually good enough. NTP has a clock discipline feature to fix RTC drift and allow the computer to keep (more) accurate time when disconnected from network time sources.
SNTP protocol is compatible with NTP and you may see SNTP referred to as NTP, but they are not functionally interchangeable. NTP is the industrial strength server solution and SNTP is for clients. SNTP will not fix the system clock drift but NTP will.
Hello. My box is not being able to fetch available updates… The logs led me to believe that it couldn’t reach security.debian.org due to time de-synchronization. After a few unsuccessful trials of manual configuration of the box’s System time through cockpit’s ui, I made the following changes to /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf
NTP=
FallbackNTP=0.debian.pool.ntp.org 1.debian.pool.ntp.org 2.debian.pool.ntp.org 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
RootDistanceMaxSec=30
PollIntervalMinSec=32
PollIntervalMaxSec=2048
ConnectionRetrySec=30
SaveIntervalSec=60
enabled NTP-sync
sudo timedatectl set-ntp true
and unmasked the service systemd-timesyncd
sudo systemctl unmask systemd-timesyncd
after that restarted the service systemd-timesyncd and validate it’s running
sudo systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd
systemctl status systemd-timesyncd
● systemd-timesyncd.service - Network Time Synchronization
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Sat 2025-07-05 20:38:00 WEST; 1h 42min ago
Docs: man:systemd-timesyncd.service(8)
Main PID: 5319 (systemd-timesyn)
Status: "Idle."
Tasks: 2 (limit: 955)
but System clock is not synchronised
$ timedatectl
Local time: Sat 2025-07-05 22:23:51 WEST
Universal time: Sat 2025-07-05 21:23:51 UTC
RTC time: n/a
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon (WEST, +0100)
System clock synchronized: no
NTP service: active
RTC in local TZ: no
PS: Since I see some weird logs like:
ERROR: INVALID_SERVICE: tor-obfs4 (I don’t have tor installed)
Object of type gaierror is not JSON serializable
error in function _wait_for_return after adding a new feather wiki.
error: kex_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host
Error processing page. GET /plinth/sys/security/report, exception: Command '['debsecan']' returned non-zero exit status 1.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py", line 181, in _get_response
response = wrapped_callback(request, *callback_args, **callback_kwargs)
can I assume some third party is preventing my box to navigate freely? 
It runs on a RaspberryPi3B+
You can find it on vgcfreebox.myrthtech.pt