[ntp:questions] Keeping NTP Honest
Richard B. Gilbert
rgilbert88 at comcast.net
Mon Jul 13 21:35:26 UTC 2009
Evandro Menezes wrote:
> On Jul 12, 3:21 pm, Unruh <unruh-s... at physics.ubc.ca> wrote:
>> The way ntp works, faster polling also means worse rate estimation and
>> more annoyance of the providers of the time. The current setup is done
>> that way to try to minimize the rate error, so if your sconnection to
>> ntp goes down, your system can freewheel with the greatest accuracy.
>
> But that's the issue: NTP allows for good freewheeling if it comes to
> that, provided that the system maintained in STP and in a vacuum.
>
> In the real world, ambient temperature changes frequently even in
> conditioned environments, network load affects packet jitter, etc.
> And all this also affects a system's peers, compounding the issue of
> NTP's slow reaction time.
>
> Thanks.
You are certainly at liberty to write your own version of NTP and have
it behave as you think best.
For most of us, NTP works quite well. I suspect that an NTP equivalent
designed to react instantly to events such as: the opening of the
computer room door, the laser printer starting or finishing a print job,
or the starting and stopping of the refrigerant compressor, would do
the job far worse than we what we have now.
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