I removed the bit about NTP as it was mostly half-baked ramblings. I obviously didn't mean "ping" the tool, rather the process of "pinging" a remote address and gauging the response time, at the most basic.

My ntpq -p output:

        remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
   ==============================================================================
    time.apple.com  .INIT.          16 u    -  512    0    0.000    0.000   0.000

Your computer has not successfully contacted the time.apple.com server. If it had the refid would not be INIT and your "reach" value would not be 0.

what happens if you change your time server to us.pool.ntp.org? (Substitute your country code for "us".)

Preferably you should have more than one server. The ntp reference implementation on osx is a little goofy because of the GUI configuration. But I think if you put us.pool.ntp.org,us.pool.ntp.org,us.pool.ntp.org for the server your computer will try to spin up three ntp connections. Atleast three, never two...

"A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure."

> But I think if you put us.pool.ntp.org,us.pool.ntp.org,us.pool.ntp.org for the server your computer will try to spin up three ntp connections.

Close, but not quite; ntpd appears to be smart enough to realize you have three identical "server" lines in ntp.conf, and collapses them. Try this instead:

1.us.pool.ntp.org,2.us.pool.ntp.org,3.us.pool.ntp.org

Changing "us" to your country code, of course. Just tested, and it appears to produce the desired behavior.

ntp is not "smart enough to realize you have three identical "server" lines in ntp.conf". Before the addition of the pool directive in 4.2.7 this was the recommended approach (as in recommended by prof. mills, harlan and the rest of the ntp reference implementation team). OSX is trying to be cute and thinks it knows more about ntp than the user.

Try editing /private/etc/ntp.conf and append:

  # use multiple ntp servers
  server us.pool.ntp.org iburst
  server us.pool.ntp.org iburst
  server us.pool.ntp.org iburst

Make sure you have an extra empty line above the comment. There is something goofy about the way osx includes the input from the graphical configuration and what is included in the /private/etc/ntp.conf In order to restart the service you need to disable/re-enable the automatically set time.