[time-nuts] NTP stratum 1 appliances with different (GPS, etc) cores...

Bob Darlington rdarlington at gmail.com
Mon Mar 9 19:19:49 EDT 2015


I run a Symmetricom Syncserver S300 at home and am trying to convince the
fine folks at work that running "ntpdate" every 15 minutes is about the
worst possible way to set time.  I'm in the NTP.org pool but am open to
direct peering if you ever get something setup:

http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/23.31.117.13

This server hardware can support an orginization at least 10x the size of
mine (Los Alamos National Laboratory).

-Bob

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Robert Seastrom <rs-lists at seastrom.com>
wrote:

>
> Hi folks,
>
> Had a recent requirement at $DAYJOB to give our NTP architecture a good
> swift kick in the pants.  High precision is not a particular requirement (1
> ms is more than adequate) but high reliability is.  I'm about done with
> explaining the difference between the two to people internally who don't
> get it.  :-(
>
> Unfortunately, these days it's impossible to get sufficient out-of-band
> sources for stratum 1 clocks unless we're building our own constellation of
> primary frequency standards (Not Gonna Happen).  So I definitely intend to
> have our stratum 2 clocks (which customer and production devices will be
> pointing at) chiming off of plenty of off-site stuff too, hopefully things
> that are connected physically to a diverse set of primary sources (i.e. not
> gps or wwvb)
>
> This approach would probably be fine for our internal consumption,
> frankly, considering our need for reliability but not supreme accuracy.
> But there's still a desire internally to run a set of stratum 1 radio
> clocks.  In the course of this discussion, I invoked a particularly nasty
> "conspiracy" that happened back in 2002 wherein every TrueTime NTS-100
> (which were extremely popular in those days) simultaneously decided that it
> was 20 years in the future and warped the time.  That's not the only case
> of devices losing their cookies; I seem to recall a problem with certain
> Motorola cores having an issue with leap seconds.
>
> Anyway, I couldn't keep my mouth shut and suggested that at the very
> least, trying for multiple vendors (we have a strong preference for
> appliancey stuff here due to internal fiefdoms, ownership issues, and
> balkanization typical of a Fortune 200 company) with different GPS cores
> would be a really fine plan.
>
> So of course, now it's my job to come up with proper nominees for this
> list.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Hopefully someone's
> already done the legwork for this.  I will likely send this same request to
> the ntp dev list...
>
> Thanks,
>
> -r
>
>
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