NTP configuration not recognized?

Solution 1:

On Red Hat there are a couple of things that happen when you do service ntpd restart.

1. ntpd is stopped
2. ntpdate is run to set an initial time. This is because, by default, ntpd will not adjust the system time past a certain threshold. ntpdate does a one off time set using a specified time server. You can do this manually with ntpdate 10.45.68.47 as long as ntpd isn't running.
3. ntpd is started again

ntpd's servers are specified in /etc/ntp.conf but ntpdate takes them from a file called /etc/ntp/step-tickers. If you look in the ntpd script in /etc/init.d you'll notice that ntpdate uses this file if there is anything in it (if it is empty, the ntpdate step is skipped). You can put your time servers in here:

server 10.45.68.47

and ntpdate will use them to set the initial time.

As an aside, you shouldn't have localhost as a time server. Use a local server and maybe some servers from the ntp pool project. Make sure they are geographically close to you for best results. Also, I would re-instate the default Red Hat config as it has some sensible defaults i.e. not allowing other servers to set the time on your server.

Solution 2:

You're apparently using Debian.

Default config options are in /etc/default/<daemon-name>.

EDIT: okay, not Debian :)

The simple truth is that you cannot run ntpdate and ntpd on the same computer without a port collision - ntpd listens on UDP 123, and ntpdate sends from UDP 123.