[ntp:questions] NTP under AIX?

William Unruh unruh at invalid.ca
Wed May 17 05:16:50 UTC 2017


On 2017-05-16, Greg Moeller <skywise at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 2:07:01 PM UTC-5, Terje Mathisen wrote:
>> Greg Moeller wrote:
>> > On Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 10:37:55 AM UTC-5, Greg Moeller wrote:
>> >> Has anyone come across the advisability of running an enterprise-wide NTP server under an AIX LPAR?
>> >> We're currently running NTP on old Intel hardware and the company policy is to refresh hardware on a regular basis.
>> >> It seems a waste to buy several new servers if we could just put the NTP service on an AIX LPAR.
>> >
>> > I'm at a large company, serving NTP to over >1000 systems.
>> > Policy is that we can't have old hardware, so they will spend several thousand $$ on servers to run a single process.  (we're an IBM/Lenovo based shop)
>> >
>> > Technically, yes, this is a virtual machine, but this is on 250K$+ hardware, not something like ESXi or Xen.
>> > (and CPU/RAM/hardware can be dedicated to the LPAR if needed)
>> > These boxes are meant for heavy lifting, the same type of frames power AIX, iSeries, IBM mainframe, and Watson.
>> >
>> > Is there a way to test?  It seems like I'm heading into the unknown here.  :)
>> >
>> There is indeed a way to test: "Just do it!"
>> 
>> I worked for many years in a similar enviroment (large multi-national 
>> corporation with factories/offices in 100+ countries), our LPAR based 
>> AIX machines were very stable.
>> 
>> Terje
>> 
>> PS. I did use to run our ultimate NTP reference clock on a hand-soldered 
>> GPS board hanging on the side of a FreeBSD (v 4.x probably, i.e. a long 
>> time ago) box under my desk.
>> 
>> A number of years later I finally got the money to do a proper job, 
>> that's when I setup 3-4 geo-distributed GPS-based Stratum 1 clocks (from 
>> 3 different vendors), with a second layer of 6+ Stratum 2 machines.
>> 
>> The S2 machines used all of the S1 servers plus a set of vetted external 
>> S1 and S2 reference servers. All other internal machines used all the S2 
>> servers as their configured sources.
>> 
>> -- 
>> - <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
>> "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
>
> Ok, I'm good with 'just do it'!  :)
> So, as a test.  If I setup 2 servers(Physical x86 and AIX LPAR) with the same external sources, how can I test them against one another?  I've dabbled in NTP for years but never delved far into the deeper numbers.
>
The best way is to attach a GPS/PPS to each of the computers, do not
take time from them, but look at the time on the PPS pulse. Th
fluctuation of that wil give you a feeling for the accuracy of the two
methods.



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