FreeBSD error: leapsecond file expired

You might see something odd in the console log about a leapsecond file:

ntpd[905]: leapsecond file ('/var/db/ntpd.leap-seconds.list'): expired 841 days ago

It just means that the leap second file is out of date, and couldn’t be updated automatically. It’s not a big deal as this data rarely changes. In fact the last one was in 2017. You can force an update with the following line:

service ntpd fetch

However, this might well give you another error like “fetch: https://www.ietf.org/timezones/data/leap-seconds.list: Not Found” The reason is that the IETF is not longer hosting the leap-seconds file although it’s baked into the FreeBSD (and likely other) configs.

On FreeBSD you can easily point it to another host at IANA by adding the following to /etc/rc.conf:

ntp_leapfile_sources="https://data.iana.org/time-zones/data/leap-seconds.list"

After you’ve done this you can trigger it manually using the fetch line above. The old source is actually configured originally in defaults/rc.conf, but it’s best to override it in the local rc.conf – and newer releases of FreeBSD have updated it anyway.