[ntp:questions] NTP under AIX?

Terje Mathisen terje.mathisen at tmsw.no
Tue May 16 19:07:00 UTC 2017


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"



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