Comment 1 for bug 246203

It's a race-condition, and is called from the ntpdate and ntp script in the DHCP exit-hook script dir:

# ls -l /etc/dhcp3/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/ntp*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1242 2008-03-07 20:37 /etc/dhcp3/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/ntp
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 802 2008-06-19 04:04 /etc/dhcp3/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/ntpdate

I see these processes:

root 6693 1 0 19:06 ? 00:00:00 /sbin/dhclient -d -sf /usr/lib/NetworkManager/nm-dhcp-client.action -pf /var/run/dhclient-eth0.pid -lf /var/run/dhclient-eth0.lease -cf /var/run/nm-dhclient-eth0.conf eth0
root 6752 1 0 19:06 ? 00:00:00 /bin/sh /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate
root 6756 6752 0 19:06 ? 00:00:00 lockfile-touch /var/lock/ntpdate
root 6788 6752 0 19:06 ? 00:00:00 /bin/sh /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d --quiet ntp start
root 6804 6788 0 19:06 ? 00:00:00 /bin/sh /etc/init.d/ntp start
root 6811 6804 0 19:06 ? 00:00:00 lockfile-create /var/lock/ntpdate

It's a regression in 8.10, but as it's not installed per default, people aren't bumping into it.

The lockfile-create/remove/touchlock binaries are provided by lockfile-progs, which are a simple C wrapper around lockfile_touch(3). See 'man lockfile_touch'.