On Mon, 6 Jan 2003, Ed Wilts wrote: > I certainly don't think you need 5-10 servers! For a typical home user, > 2 normally suffice. Your ISP probably has time servers available and > you should ask them first since they'll be the closest. I synchronize > my Linux server at home to 3 systems (all area universities) and then > synchronize my other home systems to my Linux server. The more you have the better approximation of UTC you'll get. Only having 3 servers can lead to the following situation: One server goes unavailable due to network problems at their site. One of the remaining servers in your list has a problem that skews it 30 minutes away from UTC but doesn't impact its network performance, while the other remains relatively true. Your machine will average the two, and give you a 15-minute offset time. If you'd had another two servers with good times in your list, ntpd would have ignored the time from the 30 minute skew. > The fewer the systems you can synchronize to, the better, unless you > have a very good reason for being paranoid (at work, we've also bought > our own stratum 1 time server). We synchronize one local timeserver against a broad list, and all local machines sync against that one. Many timeservers is good not only for paranoia, but also gives a more robust and accurate local approximation of UTC. If you can't get the boss to spring for a stratum 1 server, 10 stratum-2 servers' opinions is the next best thing :) -- Michael D. Jurney mike@jurney.org -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
