[TriLUG] Speaking of ntp: that would be a great service for Trilug to provide.

[Jon Carnes]

Don't have a cow man!  To me trilug is a trusted source.  I trust the
folks running the services to do a good job and in setting up NTP so
that it works great.

As an example, I had no idea there were tier 1 or 2 or even 3 ntp
servers.  I think it's cool, but really, do you think every TriLUG
member wants to do a few hours of research in setting up their ntp
service - or do you think we might want to just point to a trusted
source and be done with it?

Also, wouldn't it be of more benefit to the NTP network structure if the
load from all us individual users were off loaded to a local server?

I'm sure that Trilug uses more than one Tier 2 source in syncing their
clocks, and so is fairly accurate, probably to within a tenth of a
second.  Well that is way more accuracy than I need.

What I need most of all is easy setup of my NTP service - a single
server that I can simply depend upon to give me reasonably accurate
local time.

Thanks - Jon
 
On Tue, 2003-04-29 at 10:35, Mike Johnson wrote:
> Jon Carnes [jonc at nc.rr.com] wrote:
> > It would be great if TriLUG would provide an NTP server for our
> > membership use.  The current time.trilug.org server no longer works.
> 
> I don't think it makes sense for TriLUG to run an NTP server.  First,
> you can't just turn on ntpd and say 'yay, we have an NTP server'.  You
> have to have a decent source of time.  We have no direct source of
> decent time (GPS, radio signals, our own atomic clock, etc), so we
> cannot be a stratum 1 time server.  -If- we provide time for over one
> hundred systems, we can become a stratum 2 time server, and use a
> stratum 1 server for our source.  Since I don't think we can commit to
> one hundred clients, that means we would have to point at a stratum 2
> server, and, essentially, become stratum 3.  And then you point your
> clients at us, and you're four steps removed from the quality time
> source.  Why not eliminate a step and point your clients at a stratum 2
> server, so you're one step closer?  What's the point of using a TriLUG
> time server?
> 
> If you're having trouble finding a time server, go to:
> http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/clock2a.html
> and look for 'open access' systems, and start pinging.  Choose three
> with the lowest latency, and put their dns names (not IP addresses) in
> your ntpd.conf, and move on.
>  
> Mike