On Feb 17, 2008 5:34 AM, JR <tiresias at gmail dot com> wrote:
> VPN routers I have in production, I can only guess that the IP
> resolved for 0.north-america.pool.ntp.org by these routers at that
> time was a non-functioning ntp server. I've learned that msntp will
> not exit if it is given (or resolves to) an IP where there no ntp
> server is responding. It seems to wait indefinitely on a broken or
> unreachable time server and it is not possible to specify a timeout.

While I stand by what I said about msntp and it's timeout issue, I'm
pretty sure I've just discovered the real source of my time problem.
It seems msntp has a bug where it will not resolve hostnames that
begin with a number; instead it tries to treat them as IP addresses.
When I tested earlier using a default config, the ntp server was still
set to pool.ntp.org. After setting it to 0.north-america.pool.ntp.org
it failed to set the clock on a cold boot. Running msntp manually
gives:

# msntp -r -P no -l /var/run/msntp.pid -x 300 0.north-america.pool.ntp.org
msntp: invalid IP number 0.north-america.pool.ntp.org

This is strange and unexpected since '0' is in fact a valid hostname
and other ntp tools like ntpdate have no problem with
0.north-america.pool.ntp.org. I guess I will have to make sure I am
using north-america.pool.ntp.org instead.

JR