i is in yr pool, sinking yr servr3s

On September 10, 2007 by ian With 2 Comments - site

After meaning to get around to it for a year or so, I’ve finally got my Qube 2 providing time public services to the NTP UK Pool. Check the current status:

pool.ntp.org: minimal’s pool servers: http://www.pool.ntp.org/user/minimal

So if you use uk.pool.ntp.org then there a 1 in 738 chance (currently) that you’ll get data from it, or just use ntp.minimal.org.uk for a direct feed.

2 Comments

  1. Matthias Scheler September 16, 2007

    Where does your NTP server get is time from?

  2. ian September 16, 2007

    I’d like to say that it reads the NMEA stream from my GPS device, but unfortunately it doesn’t 🙁 I simply followed the advice given on the joining the pool page:

    The servers joining should not have pool.ntp.org as their upstream server(s), but should configure some good servers manually (those servers may be chosen from the pool. The point is that they are chosen statically instead of assigned randomly at each server restart. This will help providing an acceptable quality of service.)

    and so chose eight machines from the Stratum 2 list they linked to that had an open access policy. I also tried to mix up the continents they serve from, in the hope that links out of the UK won’t all suffer simultaneous access failure.

    I may look at getting a local time source in the future, but I’ve already had to change my ADSL router as the NTP packets were killing the last one more than once per day and it wouldn’t come back by itself (as my history graph showed) – the new one will at least auto-reset but still dies multiple times per day 🙁 I might have to get a PPPoA / PPPoE bridge and do the login via one the servers, as it’s looking tricky to find an ADSL box that will do multiple IP’s properly.

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