[ntp:questions] Number of Stratum 1 & Stratum 2 Peers

Rob nomail at example.com
Fri Dec 5 16:32:15 UTC 2014


William Unruh <unruh at invalid.ca> wrote:
>>> For internal systems I would want four servers minimum, two on-site, and 
>>> two on the company WAN,
>>
>> I think that is ridiculous.  Introducing too many safeguards often
>> results in more failures due to extra complexity in the system.
>
> The problem with two is that if oneof the servers goes nuts-- for some
> reason starts to give out the wrong time (ie, its time is not UTC time)

a. that will almost never happen
b. that will be caught by the monitoring (e.g. nagios) and an alert will
   be sent and/or the system will be shut down automatically.

> Of course your monitoring might catch this, or it might not, depending
> on whether you had thought of this failure mode when you set it up. So
> the clients could do this for days or weeks. Now if you do not care if
> the time jumps around by a second, then this is fine. Some places
> however need better time control than that.

The monitoring for ntpd servers shipped by default with nagios has no
problem detecting this.



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