NTP Server

Sun Oct 24 17:41:06 UTC 2010

Looks like you have a pretty good setup. What vendor equipment are you using? You can let me know offline so it doesn't
sound like you're advertising them....

> Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 11:03:18 -0600
> From: bruns at 2mbit.com
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: NTP Server
> 
> 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
> 