For my residential service, I changed ISPs to Zoom/Armstrong. Just after that, my NTP daemons stopped working. I dug deep and diagnosed the problem:

Unprivileged ports are getting out. When i run 'ntpdate' for example, I go out on a high, unprivleged port, and get a response on UDP 123. That's fine. The 'ntpd' daemon though, expects to go out on 123 and get its reply there as well. This must be a common problem, because it's directly addressed in the NTP troubleshooting guide.

Just to see what would happen, I wrote a detailed email to the general support address at Armstrong. They replied almost immediately with a complete technical answer! They have everything <1024 blocked, except for a few ports to support outbound VPN.

So, the question:

Can I use IPtables to essentially re-write my outbound UDP 123 up to 2123 or something like that? If I do, does there need to be a corresponding 2123->123 rule to translate the reply? This seems like NAT, but with ports, not addresses. I tried, but can't seem to get iptables to do what I want. I'm not sure if it's my lack of skill, or if I'm trying the wrong solution.

True, I could run ntpdate from cron, but that loses all of the adjustment smarts of NTP.