Description of problem: During startup, the sed cruft that creates the list of timeservers does not properly parse a valid ntp.conf. How reproducible: use the full server syntax in ntp.conf: server 10.10.10.10 minpoll 7 maxpoll 12 This is untested, but all that sed madness could probably be replaced with something a bit more simple and direct like this: awk '/[[:blank:]]+127\./{next}/^[[:blank:]]*(server|peer)[[:blank:]]+/{print $2}' ntp.conf Also, upon review, it looks to me like you have another bug. You don't allow any host with 127 followed by any character in its name.