Alright, some progress... Vincent asked me privately to try switching to sysvinit. When I did that, chronyd started successfully on boot. So that narrows it down to some kind of systemd interaction problem.
I messed around with the chronyd.service file, and commenting out the
Conflicts line resulted in chronyd starting at boot with systemd:
dilinger@e7450:~$ uptime
00:51:51 up 1 min, 1 user, load average: 0.23, 0.08, 0.03
dilinger@e7450:~$ sudo systemctl status chrony
● chrony.service - chrony, an NTP client/server
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/chrony.service; enabled; vendor preset:
enabled)
Active: active (running) since Tue 2017-12-05 00:50:59 PST; 53s ago
Docs: man:chronyd(8)
man:chronyc(1)
man:chrony.conf(5)
Process: 558 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/chronyd (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 572 (chronyd)
Tasks: 1 (limit: 4915)
CGroup: /system.slice/chrony.service
└─572 /usr/sbin/chronyd
Dec 05 00:50:59 e7450 systemd[1]: Starting chrony, an NTP client/server...
Dec 05 00:50:59 e7450 chronyd[572]: chronyd version 3.0 starting (+CMDMON +NTP
+REFCLOCK +RTC +PRIVDROP +SCFILTER +SECHASH +SIGND +ASYNCDNS +IPV6 -DEBUG)
Dec 05 00:50:59 e7450 chronyd[572]: Frequency 0.000 +/- 1000000.000 ppm read
from /var/lib/chrony/chrony.drift
Dec 05 00:50:59 e7450 systemd[1]: Started chrony, an NTP client/server.
Dec 05 00:51:10 e7450 chronyd[572]: Selected source 192.207.62.39
Dec 05 00:51:11 e7450 chronyd[572]: Selected source 108.61.73.243
Dec 05 00:51:13 e7450 chronyd[572]: Source 192.207.62.39 replaced with
2604:a880:400:d0::8a0:a000
dilinger@e7450:~$ cat /etc/systemd/system/chronyd.service
[Unit]
Description=chrony, an NTP client/server
Documentation=man:chronyd(8) man:chronyc(1) man:chrony.conf(5)
#Conflicts=systemd-timesyncd.service openntpd.service
After=network.target
ConditionCapability=CAP_SYS_TIME
[Service]
Type=forking
PIDFile=/run/chronyd.pid
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/chronyd
PrivateTmp=yes
ProtectHome=yes
ProtectSystem=full
[Install]
Alias=chronyd.service
WantedBy=multi-user.target
pgpC68RKCEMsY.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
