nanog mailing list archives
Re: NTP question
From: Harlan Stenn <stenn () nwtime org>
Date: Wed, 1 May 2019 19:02:49 -0700
On 5/1/19 5:55 PM, William Herrin wrote:
On Wed, May 1, 2019 at 5:48 PM Keith Medcalf <kmedcalf () dessus com> wrote:If you have one such installation, then you really do not care about the "accuracy" of the time. However if you have multiple such installations then you want them all to have the same time (if you will be comparing logs between them, for example). At some point it becomes "cheaper" to spend thousands of dollars per site to have a single Stratum 0 timesource (for example, the GPS system) at each site (and thus comparable time stamps) than it is to pay someone to go though the rigamarole of computing offsets and slew rates between sites to be able to do accurate comparison. And if you communicate any of that info to outsiders then being able to say "my log timestamps are accurate to +/- 10 nanoseconds so it must be you who is farked up" (and be able to prove it) has immense value.If your network is air gapped from the Internet then sure. If it's not, you can run NTP against a reasonably reliable set of time sources (not random picks from Pool) and be able to say, "my log timestamps are accurate to +/- 10 milliseconds so it must be you who is farked up." While my milliseconds loses the pecking order contest, it's just as good for practical purposes and a whole lot less expensive.
It's not clear to me that there's anything *wrong* with using the pool, especially if you're using our 'pool' directive in your config file. That directive will bring up ~10 associations and continuously evaluate their quality, throwing out the poor performers and soliciting new servers of currently-good quality to replace them. This goes to "have _enough_ good-quality servers, and monitor your ntpd".
If your system is Internet-connected. If you run an air gapped network then yeah, get your time out of band. Regards, Bill Herrin
-- Harlan Stenn <stenn () nwtime org> http://networktimefoundation.org - be a member!
Current thread:
- Re: NTP question, (continued)
- Re: NTP question Brandon Martin (May 01)
- Re: NTP question Harlan Stenn (May 01)
- Re: NTP question Harald Koch (May 01)
- RE: NTP question Keith Medcalf (May 01)
- Re: NTP question William Herrin (May 01)
- Re: NTP question Rubens Kuhl (May 01)
- RE: NTP question Keith Medcalf (May 01)
- Re: NTP question Harlan Stenn (May 01)
- Re: NTP question Stephen Satchell (May 01)
- Re: NTP question Mel Beckman (May 01)
- Re: NTP question Harlan Stenn (May 01)
- Re: NTP question William Herrin (May 02)
- Re: NTP question Chris Adams (May 02)
- Re: NTP question James R Cutler (May 02)
- Re: NTP question Harlan Stenn (May 02)
- Re: NTP question James R Cutler (May 02)
- Re: NTP question Harlan Stenn (May 02)
- Re: NTP question Eric S. Raymond (May 06)
- Re: NTP question Mel Beckman (May 01)