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