Stepping the system clock during boot

FreeBSD allows you to perform an instantaneous change to your system clock while the host is booting up no matter how great the difference between a machine’s current clock setting and the correct time.

Use the sysrc command as root to append ntpdate_enable and ntpdate_hosts to /etc/rc.conf

$ sysrc ntpdate_enable=YES
ntpdate_enable: NO -> YES
$ sysrc ntpdate_hosts=north-america.pool.ntp.org
ntpdate_hosts:  -> north-america.pool.ntp.org

Finally, to verify that everything worked correctly

$ grep ntpdate /etc/rc.conf
ntpdate_enable="YES"
ntpdate_hosts="north-america.pool.ntp.org"