[ntp:questions] Extracting ntpq like information programmatically

Brian Utterback brian.utterback at oracle.com
Fri Mar 29 18:26:31 UTC 2013


On 3/29/2013 1:26 PM, Claudio Carbone wrote:
> I mean that, when I have certain timings from different machines, if I 
> correct them by their average offset from a common source, doesn't 
> this augment the precision of the measure?
> I'm using a single external source to compare all other clocks. 

In a word, no. How do you determine their average offset? You can use 
their own estimate of that (which is what ntpq does) but taking the 
average is not adding any precision since NTP is already correcting for 
the offset it measures. You can measure the offset relative to the 
system making the test (say by running ntpdate), but then you are 
introducing a new source of error so it doesn't help you. As unruh said, 
if there was a way to improve the accuracy of the measurement over the 
network like that, NTP would already be doing it.

Brian Utterback.


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