[ntp:questions] Minimum no. of stratum 1 servers

Paul.Croome at softwareag.com Paul.Croome at softwareag.com
Mon May 21 13:31:39 UTC 2007


Suki,

If you are using just "an aerial", i.e. a single aerial, you have a
single point of failure in your configuration; also,
if you use multiple identical GPS receivers, all of your NTP stratum 1
servers will be getting the same
information and therefore the selection and clustering algorithms will
be trying to select the best server
from a bunch of identical servers. All rather pointless. Multiple
stratum 1 servers might be justifiable for reasons
of reliability, but they won't give you more precise time. In your
situation, assuming that you are using
GPS as your timesource but are not using any other timesources, i.e.
your NTP network is isolated from
the Internet, two stratum 1 servers, running in parallel and providing
mutual hot backup, might be appropriate.

The advice that you should use at least four stratum 1 servers is
correct as long as each server is
independent in the information theory sense.

Paul






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