Picking outside NTP servers (Re: NTP Issues Today)

Tue Nov 20 21:53:39 UTC 2012

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Darius Jahandarie" <djahandarie at gmail.com>

> Choosing the first four servers is usually pretty straightforward:
> *.CC.pool.ntp.org
> 
> But beyond that, I'm honestly rather curious what server selections
> are a good idea. A first thought would be an adjacent country, but
> maybe there is a benefit to picking things outside of the pool.ntp.org
> selection entirely?
> 
> I see that Jared used *.fedora.pool.ntp.org -- I wonder if there was a
> specific reason for that or if my questions are even worth thinking
> about at all :-).

Ah; the question that has plagued mankind since the beginning of.. time.

:-)

There are a couple of documents on this topic at ntp.org, and there's the
traditional list -- of questionable accuracy at this point -- of open-acess
Strat 1 and 2 servers.

For myself, I usually pick the first three in us.pool.ntp.org, tick and tock,
time.nist.gov, and a couple of regionally appropriate large universities.

I have always aimed for 6 to 8 outside servers, and a pair inside,
preferably in different locations, both talking to one another.

If your site is in Internet Business, you should probably peer with 
your business partners.  If you deal with Google Docs or AWS, you should
probably peer with them, if they have servers for that.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
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