NTPD pecularities (was: Re: problems with new kernels from yum)

[Tim]

Tim:
 
>> I'm on dialup, so my network is only ever on the net sometimes, but
>> rarely ever rebooted.  So I left NTPD on all the time.  Unfortunately, I
>> notice the following problems:
>> 
>> Trying to boot means a very long delay as NTP waits for ages before
>> giving up and letting the boot process continue without it. 
>> 
>> In the past NTP would handle losing the PPP connection.  It'd start
>> doing its business again when the PPP connection was reconnected,
>> automatically.  Now, it needs manually restarting.

Marc Schwartz:

> I have ntpd on all the time and I reboot at least twice per day as I
> move my laptop from home to office and back.

I've read somewhere that if an interface changes, NTP stops listening to
it.  Seems that way to me.  Now, I get lots of this in the log:

  ntpd[21422]: sendto(203.217.30.156): Invalid argument

Including when it ought to work (i.e. when I'm back on the internet).

Before FC4 (Red Hat 9.0 Linux), if it couldn't find an internet server,
it'd try a local server, then quickly fail if it couldn't (i.e. it
didn't take forever to boot, there was only a short delay before NTP
failed and it went onto the next step).  Then, later on, when an
internet connection was present, it'd try internet servers again, by
itself, and sync to them if it could, or should.  I didn't have to do
anything with it.

Since converting the server to FC4 (a mistake, I feel), it's just been
stuffing up.  It takes ages before giving up trying to see a server
that's not available, then it gives up entirely.

I don't see why.  It's set with four servers to check against, one local
one and three remote ones.  Surely it should comparing them all against
each other whenever it *can* and noticing that the three remote ones are
different than my local, fallback, server?

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