[clug] forcing ntpdate timeout with no network

[Ben Nizette]

Hi all,

I've got a system which runs ntpdate on startup but if the thing isn't
connected to a network (not uncommon for this machine) it sits there for
about a minute before failing.  This is actually long enough that the
system watchdog gets angry and resets the machine.

The ntpdate "-t" switch supposedly controls timeouts but doesn't fix
things in this case.  This switch value works fine if I've got a network
but an invalid server address but doesn't work if I just have no
network.  Given that, I assume the timeout in questions is more a TCP/IP
stack timeout thing rather than an ntpdate specific thing.  Anyone have
an idea how I can tweak that timeout?

I'm not much of a sysadmin so my thoughts centre around getting ntpdate
to generate a pid file and have something running in parallel killing
the thing after a few secs.  Anyone have better, less hackish ideas?

Thx,
	--Ben.