Earlier quoted context omitted.
I removed the bit about NTP as it was mostly half-baked ramblings. I obviously didn't mean "ping" the tool, rather the process of "pinging" a remote address and gauging the response time, at the most basic. My ntpq -p output: remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter ============================================================================== time.apple.com .INIT. 16 u - 512 0 0.000 0.000 0.000
Your computer has not successfully contacted the time.apple.com server. If it had the refid would not be INIT and your "reach" value would not be 0. what happens if you change your time server to us.pool.ntp.org? (Substitute your country code for "us".) Preferably you should have more than one server. The ntp reference implementation on osx is a little goofy because of the GUI configuration. But I think if you put us…
Close, but not quite; ntpd appears to be smart enough to realize you have three identical "server" lines in ntp.conf, and collapses them. Try this instead:
1.us.pool.ntp.org,2.us.pool.ntp.org,3.us.pool.ntp.org
Changing "us" to your country code, of course. Just tested, and it appears to produce the desired behavior.