On 10/24/10 9:34 AM, Brandon Kim wrote:
I wanted to open up this question regarding NTP server. I recalled
someone had created a posting of this quite awhile back.
From a service provider/ISP standpoint, does anyone think that
having a local NTP server is really necessary?
It may not be necessary, but it certainly is not a bad thing. Not
having to depend on third parties for a service is a good thing.
I've asked some of my fellow engineers at work and many of them gives
me the same response, "Can't we just use free ones out on the
internet?"
1) How necessary do you believe in local NTP servers? Do you really
need the logs to be perfectly accurate?
Perfectly accurate is very helpful when trying to associate several
incidents going on at the same time or when trying to figure out the
timeline leading up to why a machine had a kernel panic, for example.
2) If you do have a local NTP
server, is it only for local internal use, or do you provide this NTP
server to your clients as an added service?
Our master stratum 1 GPS clock only has ipv6 access to the outside
world. Our two 'public' ntp servers can talk directly to it over ipv4
or ipv6, and those are are publicly available via ipv4 or ipv6.
3) If you do have a local
NTP server, do you have a standby local NTP server or do you use the
internet as your standby server?
If the stratum 1 becomes unavailable (its 500 miles away on a different
network), the two public NTP servers are peered with one another, and
both have a different outside third-party NTP server to sync with (may
it be an upstream provider's ntp server, or one of the pool ones from
ntp.org).
Never had a problem with this setup, and its worked rather well.
--
Brielle Bruns
The Summit Open Source Development Group
http://www.sosdg.org / http://www.ahbl.org
