[ntp:questions] "clustering" ntp servers on a virtual IP?

John Thurston john.thurston at alaska.gov
Mon Jun 15 20:07:21 UTC 2020


I had thought I could gain a little resilience in my network time design 
by publishing a "friendly" name for clients to use, and reserving the 
option of using DNS to have that name resolve to one of several hosts 
running ntpd.

   clock.bar.com.  CNAME  ntp1.bar.com.
   ntp1.bar.com.   A      10.11.12.13
   ntp2.bar.com.   A      10.11.12.14

I thought that if my client was rigged to use a sever name of 
clock.bar.com, then I could adjust the reference in DNS to send traffic 
to ntp1 or ntp2. But that doesn't work out. It looks to me like it is 
common for ntp clients to resolve the addresses of their time servers 
once (at startup) and never again check to see if the address of the 
host has changed.

Which has me wondering about a several-server cluster, running something 
like keepalived, and publishing on a virtual IP.

https://www.keepalived.org/doc/index.html

Anyone here doing this for their ntp service?

--
Do things because you should, not just because you can.

John Thurston    907-465-8591
John.Thurston at alaska.gov
Department of Administration
State of Alaska


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