• Delay startup of FTL earlier to avoid database importing issues with incorrectly configured fake-clocks

OK, testing the "Delay startup of FTL earlier to avoid database importing issues with incorrectly configured fake-clocks" change in the beta. I added DELAY_STARTUP=5 and then forced it to boot without fake-hwclock. These log entries show that it was 12/31/1969 when FTL startup script started, and 7/4/2021 at the end of the 5 second sleep:

[1969-12-31 18:01:02.571 1651M] Finished config file parsing
[1969-12-31 18:01:02.571 1651M] Sleeping for 5 seconds as requested by configuration ...
[2021-07-04 14:04:17.390 1651M] Done sleeping, continuing startup of resolver...

But still getting the warning (now the New warning):

[2021-07-04 14:07:52.965 1711M] WARN: Found database entries in the future (1625425500, last: 3300). Your over-time statistics may be incorrect
[2021-07-04 14:07:53.001 1711M] New upstream server: 8.8.8.8:53 (0/1024)
[2021-07-04 14:07:53.002 1711M] New upstream server: 8.8.4.4:53 (1/1024)

Should the Delay startup change that was made to FTL have prevented this?

Yes, thanks for spotting this. I see now that we stored the time and kept that across the delay - which is obviously defeating the purpose...

Please try

pihole checkout ftl fix/initOvertime

which loads a version that initializes the time substructure only after the delay.

Yep, that seems to work. Log entries before/after delay:

[1969-12-31 18:01:01.011 1650M] Finished config file parsing
[1969-12-31 18:01:01.011 1650M] Sleeping for 5 seconds as requested by configuration ...
[2021-07-04 15:29:14.509 1650M] Done sleeping, continuing startup of resolver...

and this time no warning message. Did a couple of queries, and this is all that's at the bottom of the log:

[2021-07-04 15:29:14.732 1726M] Blocking status is enabled
[2021-07-04 15:29:16.730 1726/T1730] Compiled 0 whitelist and 0 blacklist regex filters for 2 clients in 14.2 msec

Thanks for checking, we merged the change into the release branch. Please go back to the release branch to receive further updates:

pihole checkout ftl release/v5.9