Comment 39 for bug 114505

The machines that you are having issues with, were they fresh hardy installs, upgrades, or a mixture?

How are their network interfaces managed?

Are they running Ubuntu, or Ubuntu-server?

In re-reading this bug-report, I can see there are many issues that appear to affect this bug and the NTP server restarting several times during boot appears to be related to the several ways in which it's started.

While not ideal by any stretch of the imagination, the aim was to get to a point after boot at which time ntpdate had succesfully run and NTP - if installed - was running.

From your report, this does not appear to be the case.