[NBLUG/talk]

[Dave Sisley]

Engel wrote:

>Hi guys, 
>I'm running Kubuntu on my PIII/1gig Compaq that Chris
>Wagner helped me install at the last 'fest.
>
>Now that it's been awhile, I'm noticing that at
>startup, there's a line that fails every time that
>says the computer is trying to go online and check for
>a time update from the ubuntu website during its
>loading. This means the loading sometimes hangs and I
>have to restart - or after it loads incorrectly I
>can't go online on the network and I have to restart. 
>
>I'm told because NTP is hanging on boot, I need to
>remove the ntpdate command from start-up. 
>
>Duh, remembering that I have little knowledge of names
>of progs and lingo and will be searching around to
>make sense of whatever you tell me anyway... How do I
>remove that line of ntpdate from the start-up
>sequence? 
>
>Thanks,
>Franis
>
If you were running a RedHat/Fedora variant, I'd say chkconfig would 
help, but I don't think it's available in Ubuntu (nor other Debian 
flavors, IIRC).  A quick google on how to turn on and off services (ntpd 
is a 'service' or 'daemon') at boot time tells me that 'update-rc.d' is 
the command for you.  Run 'man update-rc.d' to read up on how it works.

Here's a helpful page I found near the top of a google search for the 
command 'update-rc.d ntp remove' :
http://www.metaconsultancy.com/whitepapers/setup.htm

The relevant part is:

        The directories /etc/rc1.d/ through /etc/rc5.d/ contain symbolic
        links to the initialization scripts in /etc/init.d/. These
        symbolic links ensure that these scripts are be called with
        start and stop arguments at boot-time and shutdown-time
        (respectively). If you ever want to stop calling a particular
        initialization script at these times, you can do so using
        update-rc.d. For example, to turn off ntp synchronization, just
        [run the following command]

        # update-rc.d ntp remove

That command should remove ntpd from your start up sequence.

Hope that helps.

-dave