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NTP Pool Reaches 1000 Servers, Needs More
hgerstung writes "This weekend the NTP Pool Project reached the milestone of 1000 servers in the pool. That means that in less than two years the number of servers has doubled. This is happy news, but the 'time backbone' of the Internet, provided for free by volunteers operating NTP servers, requires still more servers in order to cope with the demand. Millions of users are synchronizing their PC's system clock from the pool and a number of popular Linux distributions are using the NTP pool servers as a time source in their default ntp configuration. If you have a static IP address and your PC is always connected to the Internet, please consider joining the pool. Bandwidth is not an issue and you will barely notice the extra load on your machine."
Their servers can keep up just fine, or at least the one I run can. My stats show 1GB per month traffic and the ntpd process taking about 1 minute/day of processor time. That has been relatively constant over the year or so the server has been in the pool.
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I think this is just a case of more==better. A bigger pool means more people can use their local zone instead of the global zone, the whole system can handle more clients, less load on servers means even more may be willing to join,
Seriously, it's not that big a deal. Just thow your server into the pool and forget about it.
Hi AC,
The NTP Pool monitors the servers and only uses those with accurate time. A server drifting several seconds off would be taken out of the pool until it got fixed.
Also, the NTP daemons are Quite Good at ignoring the servers with Bad Time Keeping.
Using ntpd with the pool servers will give you much much much more accurate time than trying to set it manually after looking at a web page.
- ask
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ask bjoern hansen
No, the network time protocol accounts for latency and eliminates its influence almost completely as long as the latency is roughly symmetric, which it usually is for small packets.
Actually ... The USB latency can be pretty bad, so it's likely you'd get better time from a well-picked internet time server. You'd definitely get MUCH better time with a proper PPS (Pulse Per Second) time keeping GPS receiver or variations of that.
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ask bjoern hansen
The component that actually determines the stability and accuracy of the real-time clock in your PC is the timebase crystal, not the RTC chip itself.
Like every other component in mass-market electronic gear, it is chosen with minimum cost as the primary consideration. Such "value engineering" also has done away with the tiny trimmer capacitor that used to be present on most motherboards, which could be used (along with a frequency counter) to tweak the oscillator frequency for better accuracy.
For real accuracy, the timebase oscillator needs to be kept at a constant temperature, which isn't possible in a PC that gets turned on and off. Ideally, the crystal (or the entire oscillator circuit) is enclosed in a package equipped with a heater element and temperature sensor, and kept at a constant temperature. Such a circuit is called an OCXO, or Oven Compensated Crystal Oscillator, and is standard equipment on laboratory grade equipment like frequency counters and signal generators.
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Well, unfortunately DynDNS will not work here, simply because the clients will resolve the IP address once at startup and then stick to it (it will not be re-resolved later). The NTP Project is working on that, but currently there is no chance to use DynDNS or even "pretty static" IPs ...
Heiko