Tracking down “ntpdate[18168]: no server suitable for synchronization found”

After installing and getting up ntpd on a RHEL-like Linux system, see http://www.certdepot.net/rhel7-set-ntp-service for example, you may want to double check iff ntpd is actually able to perform successfully. There’s a couple of shell commands to employ, most notably ntpstat and ntpq as well as timedatectl more recently with version 7 and up systems. ntpstat will tell you about the status of the time synchronisation, whereas ntpq, being executed a few times in a row, shows the servers being selected for synchronisation, the one prefixed by an aterisk as the current master, and the time left since the last synchronisation up the the synchronisation interval in the when and poll columns, respectively. timedatectl furthermore includes timezone and daylight saving information, however, the synchronisation status given here is about to be called into question, see later. So far, iff anything runs fine, you may expect something like this (consider the values changing in the when column for the second call):