On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Paul Goyette wrote:

> Every now and then, incoming connections seem to end up in nver-never
> land.  For example, attempts to connect to sendmail/smtp never get an
> answer (tcpdump shows the incoming packet, but nothing outgoing).  Yet
> connections to httpd (Apache) succeed.  And outbound connections seem to
> work just fine, too.
> 
> And, I don't know why, but most of the time when /etc/rc starts up
> xntpd, it ends up creating two processes!  One is listening on the
> proper sockets, but never does anything useful, and ntpq just times out
> when attempting to connect to the demon!

I don't know about the other problems, but the xntpd thing is normal.
It's forking a process to do the actual name resolution. This is so it
can start doing it's thing without waiting for every name in ntp.conf
to be resolved. As long as at least one {server, clock} resolves, you
should be able to watch the clock sync up as the other hosts come
online with repeated applications of 'ntpq -c rl ; ntpq -c pe'.

Maybe you're having a problem with your nameservice?

While we're on the subject, I submitted a package for ntp version 4
that's yet to be committed. (pr7835) Works for me!