[ntp:questions] Re: Lists of public NTP servers

Nelson Minar nelson at monkey.org
Mon Nov 3 16:54:28 UTC 2003


hmurray at suespammers.org (Hal Murray) writes:
> Perhaps this would be a good opportunity to encourage ISPs to
> run a NTP server for their clients and/or encourage people to
> ask their ISP for the IP address of their NTP server.

I wish that'd work, but given the current economic climate I can't
imagine ISPs volunteering to run and support yet another service. It's
also asking too much for most users to configure an NTP server at all,
although maybe DHCP would help.

We've already got the servers. MacOS has ntp.apple.com and Windows has
time.windows.com. They use them by default. Together that should
service 99% of the desktop computers on the Internet. But it doesn't
seem to be sufficient. Why not?


Then there's the probelm of accuracy. SBC's routers all serve NTP, but
they're 1 second off. And apparently time.windows.com used to be 9
minutes off!
  http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,76744,00.asp



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