So I would guess this means that you cannot get to the machine you are ntpdate'ing against. You showed that it worked when you did it against ntp.apple.com. I assume that it also works when you debug it by hand? If so, I would guess that Joris' suggestion is a good one: Joris> on my machine, I haven't got ntpdate to work out the Joris> hostnames of any ntp server. I just pinged them, copied Joris> the ip's and dpkg-reconfigure'd ntp to look for the Joris> ip's. It has worked ever since.
I have just tried ntpdate 17.254.0.26 and I got exactly the same error message (17.254.0.26 is the ip btained via ping for ntp.apple.com) Very strange ! --To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org