[ntp:questions] Isolated Network Drift Problem

Cal Webster cwebster at ec.rr.com
Tue Nov 25 19:52:34 UTC 2008


On Tue, 2008-11-25 at 14:10 -0500, Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
[...]

> > After a bit of googling I found an excellent write-up on how to use one
> > of these for an NTP server [http://time.qnan.org/ "Using a Garmin GPS 18
> > LVC as NTP stratum-0 on Linux 2.6"]
> > 
> 
> Your NTP server need not live in a computer room; it can be anywhere 
> that you have a LAN connection!  A PC that has been retired from desktop 
> service can be recycled as an NTP server.  A "486/33" has more than 
> enough computing power to be an NTP server.  You'll probably have to 
> settle for a Pentium because I think the museums have cornered the 
> market in 486s! ;-)
> 
> Some flavor of Linux would be a good choice of O/S.

Yeah, I do a lot of recycling here, what with our tiny budget. It would
have to be something reliable, though, if it's going to be our primary
time server. I'd probably reserve a couple of our old Dell Dimension XPS
PIII machines installed with Fedora 9/10.

You might be surprised to learn what's still being used in a production
environment these days. We have an old VME chassis running AT&T Unix
System III. We also have recycled Gateway 486-DX2 machine doing internal
firewall/routing between DSL links. Don't even get me started on the
real-time OS Unix variants.

./Cal




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