[ntp:questions] Re: Best way to harness multiple stratum 1 servers

John Ackermann N8UR jra at febo.com
Tue Apr 4 16:44:39 UTC 2006


Ronan Flood wrote:
> jra at febo.com (John Ackermann N8UR) wrote:
> 
> 
>>After I finish some reconfiguration, I'll have the embarrassment of 
>>riches of having five stratum one servers, each driven by an independent 
>>refclock (two GPSDO, one WWVB, and two Cesium).
> 
> 
> Good grief!  What Cesium and how do they interface to your servers?

Old HP 5061As with the digital clock option; they provide a 1pps output 
to use with the ATOM driver.

>>Is there a preferred configuration that would let the downstream box 
>>have the benefit of the multiple stratum 1s, without jumping around?
> 
> 
> Pick "the best" ?
> 
>  server x.x.x.x prefer

That's the easy answer, assuming I know which one is "best". :-)

I guess my question may go to the fundamentals of ntp:  can an NTP 
server ever do better than any of the individual servers it sees?  In 
other words, does the algorithm blend the offset/jitter/delay 
information it has to generate a concept of time based on not just one, 
but the ensemble (or at least the survivors of the sanity checks), of 
the available servers?  If so, how best to configure that?

John



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