CentOS - May 2015 - ntpdate odd behavior

I noticed this morning that my ntp time was not correct on machines.

So I manually ran "ntpdate time.apple.com" on my clients, I got
7 May 08:46:43 ntpdate[10550]: no server suitable for synchronization found

then I ran "ntpdate -d time.apple.com" and it worked .
filter offset: -163.446 -163.446 -163.446 -163.447
         0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
delay 0.20570, dispersion 0.00049
offset -163.447341
 7 May 08:46:25 ntpdate[10519]: step time server 17.253.2.243 offset
-163.447144 sec

then I ran "ntpdate time.apple.com" again and got the above error
again.

Any idea what that is about? Why is ntpdate giving the error?

This is on centos 6.6 x86_64 and same result on 3 machines.

Thanks,

jerry

In article <CABr8-B7vsi_hGtZ66k_xP5kPzskDA-VaJjJdYeyC9LgVkdn8BA at
mail.gmail.com>,
Jerry Geis <geisj at pagestation.com> wrote:
> I noticed this morning that my ntp time was not correct on machines.
> 
> So I manually ran "ntpdate time.apple.com" on my clients, I got
> 7 May 08:46:43 ntpdate[10550]: no server suitable for synchronization found
> 
> then I ran "ntpdate -d time.apple.com" and it worked .
> filter offset: -163.446 -163.446 -163.446 -163.447
>          0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
> delay 0.20570, dispersion 0.00049
> offset -163.447341
>  7 May 08:46:25 ntpdate[10519]: step time server 17.253.2.243 offset
> -163.447144 sec
> 
> then I ran "ntpdate time.apple.com" again and got the above error
again.
> 
> Any idea what that is about? Why is ntpdate giving the error?
> 
> This is on centos 6.6 x86_64 and same result on 3 machines.
Jerry, try "ntpdate -u time.apple.com" and have a look at the -u
option
in the ntpdate man page. When you use -d, it implicitly sets -u, which
your non-"-d" invocation didn't. That's probably the reason
for the
difference.

Cheers
Tony
-- 
Tony Mountifield
Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk
Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org

>Jerry, try "ntpdate -u time.apple.com" and have a look at the -u
option
>in the ntpdate man page. When you use -d, it implicitly sets -u, which
>your non-"-d" invocation didn't. That's probably the
reason for the
>difference.
>Cheers
>Tony

Tony - your correct. That did work.   the odd thing also is doing
"ntpdate pool.ntp.org" works every time, and so does time.windows.com
- but time.apple.com did not.

Thanks for the "-u" suggestion.

Jerry