[geeks] ntp rant

[Greg A. Woods]

I personally don't see why anyone would want better NTP than can already
be provided by syncing to any of the many available stratum-2 servers.

Good NTP stratum-1 clocks are necessarily very expensive because they do
things that no average person ever needs to do.  If you really want one
to work well you've got to get a very stable oscillator to use with
whatever time source you have (eg. GPS), and a good one can cost upwards
of over $5,000.00, even used.

Normal people don't need to do that kind of thing.  Only if you're
running a TV station or something similar that needs guaranteed 24x7
time accurate to a millisecond or so.

One of my colleagues has a GPS clock running as a time and PLL source
for his server.  It wasn't all that expensive, but it doesn't buy him
much either.  Here's the report from it (ntp.planix.com):

     remote           local      st poll reach  delay   offset    disp
=======================================================================
.toc.nrc.ca      204.29.161.35    1   64  377 0.16899  0.031289 0.00459
.tock.gpsclock.c 204.29.161.35    1   64  377 0.13345 -0.000044 0.00366
*GPS_NMEA(0)     127.0.0.1        0   64  377 0.00000 -0.000129 0.00093
 clock.isc.org   204.29.161.35    1   64  377 0.30965 -0.107431 0.00317


This is my server at ntp.weird.com:

     remote           local      st poll reach  delay   offset    disp
=======================================================================
.tock.usno.navy. 204.92.254.2     1   64  377 0.08556 -0.034222 0.00188
 ntp0.usno.navy. 204.92.254.2     1   64  200 0.09918 -0.033100 16.0000
.con.planix.com  204.92.254.2     1   64  377 0.11674  0.012059 0.00719
.SUE.CC.UREGINA. 204.92.254.2     2   64  377 0.19852  0.019382 0.02074
.admin.aci.on.ca 204.92.254.2     2   64  377 0.02458 -0.007611 0.00183
 clock.via.net   204.92.254.2     1   64  377 0.30728 -0.113518 0.00484
.munin.uunet.ca  204.92.254.2     2   64  377 0.03036  0.009381 0.00101
+dns2.cmc.ec.gc. 204.92.254.2     2   64  377 0.02715 -0.011028 0.00340
+dns1.cmc.ec.gc. 204.92.254.2     2   64  377 0.02789 -0.013038 0.00256
*ntp-cup.externa 204.92.254.2     1   64  377 0.10019 -0.010050 0.00604
.time.chu.nrc.ca 204.92.254.2     2   64  377 0.05063 -0.007623 0.00240
 time.nrc.ca     204.92.254.2     2   64  357 0.22382  0.070357 0.15137
.clock.isc.org   204.92.254.2     1   64  377 0.09309 -0.004102 0.00130

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>