Need trusted NTP Sources

Sun Feb 9 21:00:29 UTC 2014

On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 2:45 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
[snip]

> If I'm locked to 2 coherent upstreams and one goes insane, I'm going to
> know which one it is, because the other one will still match what I already
> have running, no?

The question should be how assured is the reliability of the clocks of the
2 upstream servers.    I  think I am pretty happy with the concept of
having two  local centralized NTP servers,   used by  various servers in an
environment ----  some SNTP some NTP,  each of the   local centralized NTP
servers  using   5     external time sources.

These external time sources need to be periodically checked, to ensure the
central NTP servers continue to synchronize with them,  and that they
continue to be accurate.

So the pair of NTP servers is not redundant in the sense that the time is
allowed to be wrong,  but  they are resilient in the sense  of being
configured,  so  their own clock should always be correct,   unless there
is a   once in 100 years failure scenario.

Each of the local servers, then has two NTP peers as time source, and the
local clock discipline,  except for virtual machines:  which should use
 just the two NTP servers.

A local pair of NTP servers are not "redundant"  in the sense of being able
to survive a catastrophic software bug in NTP;  the local time sources
should be  redundant to survive  the more highly frequent condition of
 temporary total failure of a local NTP server.

>  Or do I understand NTP less well than I think?

> Cheres,
> -- jra
>

--
-JH