NTP Server

Sun Oct 24 17:03:18 UTC 2010

On 10/24/10 9:34 AM, Brandon Kim wrote:
> I wanted to open up this question regarding NTP server. I recalled
> someone had created a posting of this quite awhile back.
>> From a service provider/ISP standpoint,  does anyone think that
>> having a local NTP server is really necessary?
>

It may not be necessary, but it certainly is not a bad thing.  Not 
having to depend on third parties for a service is a good thing.

> I've asked some of my fellow engineers at work and many of them gives
> me the same response, "Can't we just use free ones out on the
> internet?"
>
> 1) How necessary do you believe in local NTP servers? Do you really
> need the logs to be perfectly accurate?

Perfectly accurate is very helpful when trying to associate several 
incidents going on at the same time or when trying to figure out the 
timeline leading up to why a machine had a kernel panic, for example.

> 2) If you do have a local NTP
> server, is it only for local internal use, or do you provide this NTP
> server to your clients as an added service?

Our master stratum 1 GPS clock only has ipv6 access to the outside 
world.  Our two 'public' ntp servers can talk directly to it over ipv4 
or ipv6, and those are are publicly available via ipv4 or ipv6.

> 3) If you do have a local
> NTP server, do you have a standby local NTP server or do you use the
> internet as your standby server?

If the stratum 1 becomes unavailable (its 500 miles away on a different 
network), the two public NTP servers are peered with one another, and 
both have a different outside third-party NTP server to sync with (may 
it be an upstream provider's ntp server, or one of the pool ones from 
ntp.org).

Never had a problem with this setup, and its worked rather well.

-- 
Brielle Bruns
The Summit Open Source Development Group
http://www.sosdg.org    /     http://www.ahbl.org