[ntp:questions] Regarding Primary/Secondary NTP setup

Göran Törnqvist Goran.Tornqvist at cypoint.se
Tue Feb 17 08:51:18 UTC 2009


Hi,
I have 2 sites with similar setup, each with its own NTP server.
Both sites are connected so each site´ clients will use the other site´s NTP server as secondary.
The NTP primary/secondary will use 2 other stratum 1 servers to sync with.
A requirement is that traffic to secondary server is only sent when primary is unreachable.
My question is if simply configuring the client´s primary using "server X.X.X.X prefer" in ntp.conf will accomplish this?
If I understand it right ntp needs to query all servers in the server list to compute which one is the most reliable?
I guess this could be OK if this querying is done very rarely.

Also, since there shouldn´t be any traffic between the sites, the primary and secondary will not sync with each other, is this a bad idea?

Thanks for any suggestions...

Regards
Goran



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