[ntp:questions] Trying to use Dimension 4 time keeper
David Woolley
david at ex.djwhome.demon.invalid
Sat Sep 14 13:56:43 UTC 2013
On 14/09/13 10:45, David Taylor wrote:
> servers 100+ ms for servers on an inappropriate continent), and the
> offset column shows how well NTP is doing, the lower the offset the
> nearer to UTC is your PC running. The offset value will be highly
Offset doesn't tell you this. It tells you the difference between the
best estimate of the local clock and best estimate of the time on the
immediately upstream server, at the time of the last poll. The latter,
in particular, may be subject to systematic errors (in most internet
cases, these will dominate) and both are subject to random errors.
Generally the non-systematic component of the error in the local clock
will be significantly less than the RMS offset.
Jitter is probably a better estimate of quality with respect to random
errors. There is no way of measuring systematic errors, except by
accessing a source known to have lower ones.
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