New NTP Version for Windows (4.2.4p5)

Meinberg announced the availability of the new NTP for Windows version 4.2.4p5 which can be downloaded from the NTP Download page. The new version of the installer comes with the stable NTP version 4.2.4p5 from ntp.org, including the official HTML documentation and the required OpenSSL DLLs version 0.9.8e.

The new installer has been released for

• MS Windows NT
• MS Windows 2000
• MS Windows XP (32bit)
• MS Windows 2003 (32bit)
• MS Windows Vista (32bit)
• MS Windows XP (64bit)
• MS Windows 2003 (64bit)
• MS Windows Vista (64bit)

The installer as well as the NTP binaries (ntpd.exe, ntpq.exe ...) have been digitally signed.

This new NTP version includes improvements that affect the behavior of NTP after changes of available network interfaces. NTPD now handles IP address changes as well as appearing and disappearing network interfaces gracefully and unlike older versions does not require to restart NTP. If name resolving does not work when NTPD (the NTP service) is starting or if no network interface is available at that time, NTP will wait and retry until a network interface becomes available and the host names of defined NTP servers can be resolved. This version therefore can be used perfectly on notebooks or other types of mobile computers with changing interfaces.

Additionally 4.2.4p5 includes fixes that allow it to run under Windows NT, something that has been impossible since 4.2.0a and kept NT users from using a recent version of NTPD on their systems.

The installer itself experienced only minor improvements, among other things a bug has been fixed that caused earlier versions of the installer to create a wrong "InstallSSL" entry in the Unattended Install template (install.ini). With this version the correct "InstallOpenSSL" entry is created correctly.

This update has been marked as "recommended for Windows Users" by the ntp.org team.

Important Note: If you want to make use of the new network interface handling routines, you have to reinstall NTP and cannot use the "Update Binaries" function of the installer (you will be asked if you only want to replace the binaries when the installer detects an already installed version of NTP during startup - please answer "no" here) . The installer needs to recreate the service management entry for NTP to include the required "-U 3" command line switch that sets up a network interface update interval of 3 seconds.

Support for NTP on Windows can be requested by sending a mail to ntp-support@meinberg.de .