Thanks, glad to see I'm not the only one with the issue. Did some more searching and it seems it only logs the sync that happens at daemon start up, but is supposed to resync at some compiled in interval. Check the most recent sync time with the times from
stat /var/lib/systemd/clock
On my Debian 8.9 Beaglebone Green I changed /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf to have a line:
This is the server that I know is being used by the Lorex DVR device which is the most important wrt the time sync with my Beaglebone Green.
I then did:
sudo systemctl stop systemd-timesyncd
sudo systemctl start systemd-timesyncd
and sudo systemctl status systemd-timesyncd showed I was apparently now using the
pool.ntp.org server.
Using: stat /var/lib/systemd/clock
Mine seems to be updating every 35 seconds, although apparently the interval will change as sync gets better/worse.
After doing this about 45 minutes ago my Beaglebone is now within 1 second of the Lorex, where it was about 5 seconds off before. Is it possible that extra jitter in the time functions is caused by a fairly heavy and variable workload? tops shows load averages: 0.20 .010. 0.07
OTOH my BBW Debian 9.2 system, which has been up about a day longer than the BBG (did a test reboot yesterday) now seems well synced, but it is very lightly loaded basically just running my ssh session to make these tests.
The systemd-timesyncd update interval seems to be about 34 minutes.
So I'm not sure what is really going on here, but as long as the BBG and the Lorex stay synced to +/- 1 second I don't need to understand it :)