From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.3; Linux) (KHTML, like Gecko) Description of problem: In FC3 ntpd has 2 problems 1) Starts too early 2) hangs Especially if you want to use NetworkManager (which starts very late), ntpd should be started later. ntpd failing to start hangs the startup for about 10-15 seconds.  This shouldn't happen. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): ntp-4.2.0.a.20040617-4 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.boot w/ ntpd enabled without network connectivity or with changed connectivity 2. 3. Additional info:
I think if the call to the (deprecated) ntpdate in the init script were removed, this (and several other) problems would disappear. Instead, run ntpd with the -g flag to recover from large time errors.
This bug still exists even in rawhide. As more and more people start to use NetworkManager, it's quite annoying to have the delay of ntpd starting and then the error message because the network is not started.
Fedora Core 3 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC5 updates or in the FC6 test release, reopen and change the version to match. Thank you!
system-config-date now doesn't fill the /etc/ntp/step-tickers file by default so ntpdate isn't called during boot. The issue with NetworkManager still needs to be addressed.
ntpd 4.2.4 handles dynamic interfaces correctly, so it should be finally ok with NetworkManager.