On Tue May 04, 2004 at 03:35:26PM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> The particular problem case is us.pool.ntp.org, which selects among a 
> large set of servers.  I suppose I could write a little daemon that 
> queries for it (and other important servers) after things are booted, 
> and changes the "static" entries in /etc/hosts...
> 


Hmm,
I'm not sure why or if its supposed to be this way, but out
of the 6 current nameservers for pool.ntp.org, 5 allow zone
transfers...

a.ns.madduck.net.
aventura.bhms-groep.nl.
slartibartfast.bhms-groep.nl.
usenet.net.nz.
zbasel.fortytwo.ch.

You could slave the pool.ntp.org zone on your system and query locally.  
"heartbeat-interval" and "dialup" look to be two helpful options for
named.conf if this is a route that can be relied upon.

-- 
Courtney R. Spencer