[ntp:questions] NTP - best practice if there is a local stratum 2 server

solx nospam at example.net
Tue Jun 30 19:23:52 UTC 2009


Dave wrote:
> I'm trying to set up the time on a couple of machines at the University 
> of Washington and have tried two ways:
> 
> 1) Sync both to the ntp pool - not very successful, as they kept 
> differing by enough to cause 'make' to say files were created in the 
> future by a few ms - no doubt due the NFS exported drives.
> 
> 
> 2) Set one via ntpd (call is master) from the ntp pool, then the other 
> local machine (slave) read the time from the master. That appears to 
> work quite well. They at least agree on the time pretty closely now. The 
> absolute accuracy might not be as good as possible with a local time 
> server, but for practical purposes it works well.
> 

Hi Dave,

I had a similar problem with make and clearcase back in 1998, so 
purchased three clocks which were connected to three pentium II pcs 
running solaris x86 and ntp (not the solaris build). They were accurate 
to 1/16 of a second and were used to synchronise all Unix and Windows 
equipment. You will want your NFS servers and clients using a common 
pool of ntp servers.




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