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Feeding GPS Time to a Private NTP Server?

Posted by Cliff on from the what-time-is-it dept.

farrellj asks: "I have a customer that wants to be able to sychronise time on hundreds of servers that are spread all across the continental US and Hawaii. He was using publicly accessable NTP servers, but would rather have his own server that is not dependant on outside servers, and not have to worry about NTP based attacks. You can get a good quality and accurate time from GPS, so he looked at using a GPS reciever hooked up to a machine in his server room, but none of the GPS software out there seem to be able to just pull out the time, and then feed it to an NTP server. Has anyone tried to do this before, or know of a program that will read at GPS reciever and feed it to a NTP server process?"

6 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. GPSD by agentk · · Score: 5, Informative

    I use Remco Treeffkorn's GPSD to read data off of GPS devices in my tracking library (libtracking-- see interreality.org)

    http://russnelson.com/gpsd/

    --

    VOS/Interreality project: www.interreality.org

  2. Hows about this? by olrs · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is the result of a quick googleing. Have you looked at this type of product? http://www.lantronix.com/products/nts/ntpe1_tr1/in dex.html

  3. Use the standard Unix NTP d�mon: nptd ... by geirt · · Score: 5, Informative
    Use the standard NTP dæmon in RedHat, Debian and other called ntpd

    Ntpd supports many GPS reference clocks directly, so you don't need any special software to "pull out the time, and then feed it to an NTP server".

    --

    RFC1925
  4. www.ntp.org by hawkfan · · Score: 4, Informative

    ntp.org. Did you even look? There are plenty of gps recievers capable of providing a pps signal to ntpd.

  5. You need TARDIS by ka9dgx · · Score: 4, Interesting
    If you're in a windows environment, you can use Tardis which supports getting time from NTP AND via GPS.

    --Mike--

  6. Appliance by dotslash · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There are a number of purpose built systems that are designed as highly accurate NTP stratum 1 servers, with GPS input.

    These are rack-mountable 1u servers designed for service provider environments. I have deployed several such systems.

    Have a look at TrueTime" for an example.

    Some of these systems are Linux/ntpd/gpsd based, but come with support and in a turn-key format with Web based GUI.