Comment 38 for bug 90267

"Me too" on this situation. Clean installation of the latest Gutsy, with all updates applied.

My fix has been to disable the ntp daemon startup in the ntp scripts, and have the daemon started through an if-up.d script, which simply sends a 'start' signal to /etc/init.d/ntp. This is workable, although I haven't tested how it will work if link goes down. If I understand things correctly, the if-up.d script should fail semi-gracefully when the link comes back up, and ntp should be able to engage in synchronization activities again.

From what I can tell, installing the NTP service (instead of using ntpdate, which is the default) actually *disables* time sync via NTP in Gutsy, because of the race conditions created.

Part of the problem is the NTP server's behavior, but it seems to be mostly a problem with how Network Manager communicates link status to other services. I may be wrong, but it seems that services started from the /etc/rc*.d/ directories have no way of knowing the status of links that are brought up via Network Manager, outside of checking a flag set by an if-up.d script (this strikes me as a bit of a hack).