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OK changing to the default setting has cleared up the errors. It looks like NTP still tries to spawn multiple servers but the behavior is different (it gives up after a few tries rather than trying over and over):

2024-05-26T16:19:53-07:00   Error   ntpd   daemon child exited with code 1   
2024-05-26T16:19:53-07:00   Error   ntpd   unable to bind to wildcard address :: - another process may be running - EXITING   

This appears to be a limitation in the NTP server itself.

I think we can mark this resolved.

Thanks so much for your help!

The LAN connection should be stable. It's connected to a Cisco SG200 switch, good cable, short length, etc.

The WAN connection is not stable.

fwiw I am dual stack WAN and LAN w/ ipv6 set to tracking.

Can you explain what this setting is for? I thought I was setting which interfaces NTP would listen (and answer) on.

My intent was to prevent exposing my NTP to the world. (fwiw I do not have this port open on the fw).

I will flip this to the recommended value to see if it changes the behavior.

I did: interfaces is currently set to LAN.

I think these errors are caused by multiple ntpd daemons being launched. If you kill them all and then restart the logging errors stop. However the issue will return eventually. I do not know yet what causes this. My WAN constantly goes down or drops packets (this is the real silicon valley) and my primary suspicion is that this is related to a forced restart of the server when the WAN goes down. Not exactly sure because I don't see anything in the log that suggests a restart was attempted.

root@blah:/home/user # ps auxf|grep ntp
root    17315   0.0  0.1   23664    8620  -  Ss   13:59      0:11.72 /usr/local/sbin/ntpd -g -c /var/etc/ntpd.conf
root    18836   0.0  0.1   23260    8456  -  Ss   13:59      0:07.52 /usr/local/sbin/ntpd -g -c /var/etc/ntpd.conf
root    25015   0.0  0.1   23132    8420  -  Ss   13:57      0:11.02 /usr/local/sbin/ntpd -g -c /var/etc/ntpd.conf
root    26552   0.0  0.1   23664    8568  -  Ss   13:57      0:11.35 /usr/local/sbin/ntpd -g -c /var/etc/ntpd.conf
root    67431   0.0  0.1   23664    8604  -  Ss   13:59      0:11.26 /usr/local/sbin/ntpd -g -c /var/etc/ntpd.conf
root    87718   0.0  0.1   23664    8572  -  Ss   14:01      0:11.82 /usr/local/sbin/ntpd -g -c /var/etc/ntpd.conf
root    94110   0.0  0.0   12720    2384  0  S+   09:53      0:00.00 grep ntp

NTP does appear to be working so at the moment this is little more than an annoyance. But this is causing the system to log >80MB per day and makes the logs unreadable (without parsing) so it would be pretty useful to resolve this.

I'm not that famliar with FreeBSD (coming from Linux) but let me know where to look and I can collect some data.