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."

Comments

Re:didnt they think of this?

[ask]

The NTP protocol gives very limited ways of limiting it, so short of just closing down if we can't add servers as fast as traffic is added, no - there isn't much we can do.

The vendor program is one way we're trying to get more control, but all else being equal - more servers helps.

Re:NTP Isn't Accurate

[Mike Morgan]

3 Minutes?!?

  I have my machines synced via ntp. ntpq reports than I'm no more than 3ms out of sync with a stratum 1 time server (9ms out of sync with UNSO) and that server is synced with GPS and USNO which as you said is never more than .0001ms out of sync with UTC.

    Eye-balling like you described I can verify that I am within 2000ms of http://time.gov/. I think perhaps that that website may have had issue on the date you saw it being 3 minutes different than what NTP provided.

I'd show you the ntpq output but the lameness filters prevent it.

Re:Why not make it peer-to-peer

[nuintari]

Because the number one rule of infrastructure is, "never trust the client." Peer to peer networks are full of malware/trojans/assholes, and generally far too easy to infiltrate with unwanteds.

And while I agree with your sentiment that I can live time being off by a little, I also run a lot of UNIX servers that use NFS heavily. I am far more concerned with all of my network machines agreeing on what time it is on my network, than being correct with the world. I sync two dedicated time servers to the ntp.org pools (soon to be three), and all my internal hosts sync to those two. Being synced with the world is very handy, and generally I would prefer it. But being in agreement with myself is non-negotiable, I just need it.

Re:Windows Time

[DeusExCalamus]

Or (in winXP as admin account at least) you can doubleclick on the clock, go to internet time, and enter the ntp server there.

Re:huh?

[Kadin2048]

Yes. There are lots of time-sensitive tasks that require at least second-accuracy, some that require accuracy that's greater than that.

The first thing that comes to mind is remote logging. If I have several machines logging to some remote machine somewhere (as you should on any non-trivial system, to make a log falsification more difficult), it makes log analysis a lot easier if I know that the timestamps in the log are accurate and consistent across machines. Particularly if you ever have to dig through a break-in (or what you think might be a break-in), or just user stupidity, where you want to match actions taken on one machine to results on another.

At the very least, you want to make sure that all the clocks on the machines are accurate to at least the smallest interval of time that you might have two timestamps on the log apart by. Or if that's not possible, at least within a span so that the same human-initiated command will be discernible across the system at the same time in the logs.

Other things that involve remote data-collection have the same issue. At the very least, you need to have all your computers set so that they're accurate to some factor that's less than the time between data collections. While "data collection" sounds esoteric, it could be something as simple as sending emails from one computer to another, or combining two stacks of digital photos taken from some webcams (if they're portables, that's a separate ball of wax).

Now, do most of these things require all of the computers in your home network to be individually pinging a Level 2 timeserver? No. It would work just as well to have your gateway router get the time from a timeserver, and then offer NTP broadcasts to your network, so that everything could just synchronize itself. You'd have high precision local time, for synchronization, and reasonable accuracy time to a national standard. But that's beyond most users, so most OSes just have each workstation take care of things on its own.