How to Fix NTP Error Linux sntp: adj_systime: Invalid argument

One of my clients AstLinux PBX’s was acting up a couple weeks ago by going into after hours mode in the middle of the day. Upon further investigation it turned out the PBX had lost power and rebooted so I realized the date/time was very wrong. The date command revealed the operating system believed it was 1999 so I figured the CR2032 battery on the board had gone bad. After replacing the battery I was expecting NTP to set the correct time for me, well that was a wrong assumption.

I restarted the NTP service many times only to continue getting an error of:

pbx ~ # service ntpd start
Starting ntpd...
sntp 4.2.8@1.3265-o Sat Feb  7 06:51:14 UTC 2015 (1)
2015-08-15 05:06:36.118274 (+0500) -8696498.478863 +/- 5797665.661695 north-america.pool.ntp.org 149.20.68.17 s2
adj_systime: Invalid argument

I checked the logs which reported the same issue:

pbx ~ # date
Sat Jan 22 15:59:53 EST 2000
pbx ~ # cat /var/log/messages
Jan 22 16:07:48 pbx daemon.notice ntpd[517]: ntpd 4.2.8@1.3265-o Sat Feb  7 06:49:37 UTC 2015 (1): Starting
Jan 22 16:07:48 pbx daemon.info ntpd[517]: Command line: ntpd ?
Jan 22 16:07:48 pbx daemon.info ntpd[518]: proto: precision = 11.734 usec (-16)
Jan 22 16:07:48 pbx daemon.info ntpd[518]: getconfig: Couldn't open 
Jan 22 16:07:48 pbx daemon.info ntpd[518]: Listen and drop on 0 v4wildcard 0.0.0.0:123
Jan 22 16:07:48 pbx daemon.info ntpd[518]: Listen normally on 1 lo 127.0.0.1:123
Jan 22 16:07:48 pbx daemon.info ntpd[518]: Listen normally on 2 eth0 192.168.247.10:123
Jan 22 16:07:48 pbx daemon.info ntpd[518]: Listening on routing socket on fd #19 for interface updates
Jan 22 16:09:03 pbx user.info sntp[700]: sntp 4.2.8@1.3265-o Sat Feb  7 06:51:14 UTC 2015 (1)
Jan 22 16:09:03 pbx user.info sntp[700]: 2000-01-22 16:09:03.294382 (+0500) +482356762.551 +/- 321571175.034339 ntp.myfloridacity.us 71.40.128.146 s1
Jan 22 16:09:03 pbx user.err sntp[700]: adj_systime: Invalid argument

At this point I figured the date was so far off that the system could not calculate the correct time based on the Invalid argument log entry. So I went ahead and manually set the date/time using the date command.

pbx ~ # date -s 2015.05.17-13:28:00
Sun May  17 13:28:00 EDT 2015

Then I did a restart on the NTP service which restored NTP to working order.

pbx ~ # service ntpd restart

All was back to normal after that, just make sure to manually set the time to be as close as possible then restart the ntpd service.