Hi all,
Thanks for your replies James and Hans.  I've included some responses in
the bellow email:


> moin moin TJ,
>
> what James said in regards to debugging ntp :).
>
Ill check on these step tickers, but my understanding was that the -g
option should take care of that.  Can I put in sdout's in the init script
to log when stuff is being done so i can maybe trace where it quits?  Any
recommendations on where to put them in or how to do some debugging here?


> Here are some other things to check.
>
> Is there some ntp process already running?
>
> ps auxw | grep ntp
>
> No NTP process already running.


> Is there a config file in /etc/default/ that has an entry to not start
> ntp?
>
> Only see an ntpdate config that basically says to look at the server list
in ntp.conf rather than it's own and a ntp config that includes the option
-g that I was originally looking to include here.

Is ntpdate installed and configured to prevent ntpd from starting?
>
> ntpdate is apparently installed

As James mentioned, ntp will refuse to change the time if it's off too
> much. Check to see if the systems are within a couple of minutes of the
> actual time.
>
> ntp will quit if the time is off by 1000 s or more but the -g option
should override that.
 ( -g Normally, ntpd exits with a message to the system log if the offset
exceeds the panic threshold, which is 1000 s by default. This option allows
the time to be set to any value without restriction; however, this can
happen only once. If the threshold is exceeded after that, ntpd will exit
with a message to the system log. This option can be used with the -q and
-x options.)

Verify your hardware clock is set to UTC.
>
> Make sure your OS is set at the proper offset from UTC, e.g. you're set to
> now and AZ time zone, rather than now and eastern time zone.
>
> If the boxen are servers they should be set to UTC. Star date blah, blah,
> blah and all that.
>
Both hardware and software are set to UTC on our servers.


> cioa,
>
> der.hans
>