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

[Mike Johnson]

Jon Carnes [jonc at nc.rr.com] wrote:
> 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.

Trust isn't really the issue, here.  We provided mirrors because it's
difficult to find high speed mirrors that aren't full.  There's a ton of
low latency public NTP servers out there, and it doesn't take long to
track them down.  It would be redundant (and inaccurate) for us to set
up a stratum 3 server for people to sync off of.
 
> 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?

No, but if every TriLUG member does a few quick google searches, they'll
find the NTP servers.  And they'll read about it, and -learn-.  Time is
-not- simple.  Time is important.  People need to learn, and understand
about time.  But you do it once.  You sit down, learn, and then you know
about the different levels of time.  And you know where to go to get a
server list.  And you come up with three or for low latency servers that
are open access, and you write them down in your notes, and use them.
 
> 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?

Possibly, but trilug.org isn't neccesarily 'local' to everyone within
TriLUG.  I would imagine that if you ping some of those servers in the
stratum 2 list, you'll get lower latency than to trilug.org
 
> 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.

But you cannot rely on one source for time.  If that one source goes
down (as happens every now and again), you loose sync.  If you loose
sync and drift too far, you'll end up with large jumps in time, which
can be bad depending on your services.

In the end, if there's enough interest in it, I'm sure we'll see what we
can do.  But I do not think it's a good idea.

Mike
-- 
"If life hands you lemons, YOU BLOW THOSE LEMONS TO BITS WITH 
 YOUR LASER CANNONS!" -- Brak

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