On Sun, 24 Oct 2010, George Bonser wrote:
The main reason for that is that the "free" servers won't remain "free" if every single individual host on the Internet is hitting them. By running your own internal servers a stratum down you offload that traffic from the public servers and preserve that resource. NTP is a great candidate for v4 anycast, too, so you can have a common configuration at all your locations if you want.
It sure would be nice if datacenter facilities offered an independent NTP time source as a benefit for hosting with them. It would also be great if ISPs would offer this on the local network as well for their customers, as likely they are already have one in several regions. time.windows.com and time.apple.com are also fine, though I'm not sure either has published their NTP source, whether it is a device or they are simply using the same ntp.org pool as many of us. I've never had a problem with the public NTP sources, but as George said, "free" may not always be "free." Beckman --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------