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Set Your Clocks With Pooled NTP Servers
flok writes "Since we all want to have the time correctly set on our servers we all want to synchronize to some ntp-server. Not everyone has such an NTP server available, so that is why www.pool.ntp.org was started. If your server is synced to some discrete timesource like GPS or something like that you can also join the group to help this initiative!"
There are many publicly available time servers. I don't quite get why this is all that important.
It's useful to use the pool as a default address when distributing software, routers, etc., to avoid situations like this: Flawed Routers Flood University of Wisconsin Internet Time Server.
Yep, the protocol is "low bandwidth", then again that does nothing for the utilization bandwidth that the server's experience.
By default, Windows 2k (and beyond) when time service is started all hit Microsoft's time server. Can't think of a better way to burn up Microsoft's bandwidth myself, but such is life.
By default Netgear routers (up until the last six months or so) all attemmpted to get their time reference from the University of Wisconsin't time server. There was a flaw in the software that caused the implementation that caused the devices to pull down time samples repeatedly, and this caused an effective denial of service to the UW connectivity for the location that provided that clock service. (perhaps a fix would have been to alter the dns entry to point back to microsoft's server, though that might have been actionable.)
Additionally just because a time server is available today, does not mean that it will be publically available tomorrow.
Personally I like the option of using Tick and Tock, over using a gps time source, because Tick and Tock have been corrected for cosmic clock drift, while the gps clocks have not been so adjusted.
But that's just me. Use your own adjusted time source.
-Rusty
You never know...