> i think that ntpdate should be run with "-b -s" at boot time,
> rather than just "-b", so that it's messages are logged via
> syslog, not to stdout.
>
> i will change this in a few days, unless there are reasonable
> objections.

Well, I have in my local /etc/rc for a long time had this
construct:

    poll=`egrep '^server|peer' /etc/ntp.conf | awk '{ print $2 }'`
    output=`$ntpdir/ntpdate -b $poll 2>&1`
    offset=`echo $output | sed -e 's/.*offset //'`
    echo -n ", ntpdate (off: $offset)"

(Maybe not as clever as it coulb be, but the effect is the
point...)  You could if course also log the ntpdate output via
the syslog command.  I do however find it nice to see when the
machine boots (among the startup messages) how much it's drifted
away from real time.

Just a thought,

- Havard