[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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