Comment 31 for bug 114505

greetings,

As J Carerra mentioned, I was also having some problems with ntpd on Gutsy. I managed to solve my problems though, so I'm posting the solution
here in the hope that it might help someone else too.

My original analysis of the problem I was having with ntpd (which J Carerra has quoted here) was not quite correct (after hours of digging through init scripts I got slightly confused about which scripts run from rcS.d and which from rc2.d). The DHCP server in the building where I live doesn't provide NTP
servers, so I can't comment on what happens when your DHCP server does provide NTP servers.

I basically had two separate problems that were preventing ntpd and ntpdate from working properly:
* With NetworkManager managing my ethernet connection, ntpd was being started before eth0 was up, so ntpd couldn't associate with any other
   ntp servers. Then, when eth0 did come up, ntpdate couldn't run, because ntpd was already running.
* When I stopped NetworkManager from managing my ethernet connection by adding an entry for eth0 in /etc/network/interfaces, so that eth0 would be
   brought up by rcS.d/S40networking before ntpd was started by rc2.d/S23ntp everything worked most of the time. However /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate
   was running ntpdate in the background, which meant that every once in a while ntpdate would still be running by the time rc2.d/S23ntp tried to start
   ntpd, thus preventing ntpd from starting.

I managed to solve my ntp problems by writing a new script (which I'm attaching here) to replace /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate. This script works for me regardless of whether NetworkManager is managing my internet connection. If you want to try this solution, do the following:
* Leave the symlinks to /etc/init.d/ntp intact (the script won't start ntpd if it is disabled in the current runlevel)
* Deactivate (remove executable permissions from) /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate
* Put the new ntpd script at /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpd (and give it proper ownership and executable permissions)
* Enjoy (hopefully)

For every network interface that is brought up (except the loopback interface), this script:
* Stops ntpd (if it was running already)
* Runs /usr/bin/ntpdate-debian and
   - if ntpdate successfully sets the clock, also runs hwclock --systohc
* Starts ntpd again (but only if it is configured to start in the current runlevel)

Be warned though, that this script may cause misleading log entries (particularly if NetworkManager is not managing your internet connection) claiming that ntpd failed to start when it actually did start. Unfortunately I don't really see a way of preventing this from happening.