The NTP Pool Needs More Servers — Yours, If Available

Do you have a static IP or two? If so, you might be able to spread some Internet infrastructure well-being with very little effort. An anonymous reader writes "The NTP Pool project is turning 10 soon, and needs more servers to continue serving reasonably accurate time to anyone in the world."

Comments

More than just a static IP

[MetalliQaZ]

Anyone considering this should carefully read the NTP pool's page on the matter. In addition to having a static IP, you need to have fairly good availability over a long period of time, and more importantly you need to be able to handle a lot of traffic. Even though the traffic is fairly low most of the time, you could experience spikes that would be difficult to handle for small businesses or amateurs. Also, anyone with metered bandwidth on their server/colo would almost certainly be unable to handle the cost.

The NTP pool is something that you have to consider carefully. You can't help out for 18 months and then decide to quit. You can expect to receive traffic for up to YEARS after you leave the pool.

-d

Re:Why not use EC2?

[TooMuchToDo]

Virtual machines cannot be used for NTP:

http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/KnownOsIssues#Section_9.2.2.

NTP was not designed to run inside of a virtual machine. It requires a high resolution system clock, with response times to clock interrupts that are serviced with a high level of accuracy. No known virtual machine is capable of meeting these requirements.
Run NTP on the base OS of the machine, and then have your various guest OSes take advantage of the good clock that is created on the system. Even that may not be enough, as there may be additional tools or kernel options that you need to enable so that virtual machine clients can adequately synchronize their virtual clocks to the physical system clock.

Re:Do you need a clock?

[GuruBuckaroo]

Minimal. NTP packets are about 128 bytes. Individual clients will (if up to spec) contact no more than every 64 seconds, but up to 17 minutes once synchronized (or longer if using SNTP). I'm in the pool and I never notice the traffic.