For at least 17 years folks have asked for ntpd to re-resolve hostnames given in ntp.conf. For the limited case of "pool", that's been done for over a decade. Generalizing that to all server/peer hostnames hasn't happened until now.
Ideally this would happen even when the IP address ntpd resolved still provides NTP service, but I haven't done that part yet. I have a test tarball which re-resolves hostnames of servers which are no longer responding on the previously-resolved IP address. I would very much appreciate a bit of testing before this code is integrated into the distribution. Because re-resolution happens only when the server is no longer responsive, it will be easiest to test using a hostname in /etc/hosts or in a DNS domain you control, so that you can point it to a hostname which doesn't work initially, then change the hosts file or DNS to point to a hostname that does work. In the case of DNS, you could also have several A or AAAA records for one name where only one actually serves NTP, and with a little luck you'll get one of the non-working IPs first. I'm not sure if that can be done with the hosts file. Feedback is welcome via https://bugs.ntp.org, or to questions@lists.ntp.org, or directly to me at daveh...@gmail.com or h...@ntp.org. Find it at: https://people.nwtime.org/hart/ntp-stable-617.tar.gz Thanks in advance, Dave Hart
