ntp rant

I hate NTP. It does a simple job in such a ridiculously arcane way. I've been using it for years and still don't even know how to determine whether it's doing anything at all. Just because nptq -p spouts its usual gibberish (not documented in the manpage of course), don't assume your clock is sync'd. Informative error messages? Forget it! "no server suitable for synchronization found." Wow, a single unvarying sentence that describes every possible issue! Check the syslog for more and you'll probably find "ntpd exiting." Oh, now I understand!

ntp is the sendmail of time synchronization. (That's not a compliment). Isn't there something better? I'm perfectly willing to sacrifice a few milliseconds of accuracy here or there if that's what it takes.
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