The whole point of ntpdate is to synchronize the local clock with another source (ie. not the local clock). And I guess the main reason why they do not start ntpd if ntpdate fails, is because they have to protect other ntp clients from being poisoned by a wrong system clock upstream (because its source is unavailable). Hrm. What does your initscript look like for ntpd? Ie which version? I just had a look around at some RHEL3.x and 4.x (as well as some CentOS ones) and none of them will refuse to start ntpd if the ntpdate run fails. The only thing they do when ntpdate fails is add the "-g" option, which will let ntpd jump the clock more than 1000s. But no matter what, ntpd will start. Mike