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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: pool.ntp.org NTP servers
In <[email protected]> Phillip Vandry <[email protected]> writes: > On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 09:41:39AM -0500, wayne wrote: >> >> This seems like a good time to put in a plug for the pool.ntp.org NTP >> servers. This is collection of public ntp servers provided by >> individuals and ISP's placed in a round-robin DNS system. The goal is > > Following other advice earlier in this thread, wouldn't it be better to > hand pick NTP servers that you know you have a symmetric route to? Hi. I've gotten a fair amount of response to my plug for the pool.ntp.org project, however, it appears that I wasn't very clear about what the project is. First off, I'm not in charge of the pool.ntp.org project, so I can't add any servers to the pool. The admin email address you should contact if you can provide a server is: [email protected] Secondly, the pool.ntp.org servers aren't all stratum-1, some are even stratum-3 or so. The goal here isn't to provide everyone with the absolute best time standard, but to provide everyone with a good enough time standard that you can just plop pool.ntp.org in without thinking too much about it. Actually, this project started out as a way to try and keep people from abusing stratum-1 time sources by plopping in a fixed list as a default. For example, the Debian Linux distribution now comes with three pool.ntp.org servers picked at random from the round-robin DNS as a default. Since you don't know where in the world or on what networks these Linux installations will be placed, picking three random NTP sites is far better than picking a fixed list or picking nothing at all. People who care about sub 10ms accuracy will go find better time sources, but most people just want sub 1min accuracy. Again, if you can either provide a public ntp server, or you can influence people to use the pool.ntp.org servers instead of abusing other servers, please check out: http://fortytwo.ch/time/ Of course, your users should be using ISP or company specific NTP servers if they can, if they can't, using pool.ntp.org is better. -wayne
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