From: Peter Beckman Sent: Sunday, October 24, 2010 11:33 AM To: North American Network Operators Group Subject: RE: NTP Server
On Sun, 24 Oct 2010, George Bonser wrote: It sure would be nice if datacenter facilities offered an independent NTP time source as a benefit for hosting with them.
One provider I worked with in the past used to offer it but stopped because customers apparently had a wide variety of expectations on what that should be. It turned into a complaint generator when people would demand stratum 1 or if one of the servers was down for a bit so they just shut it off. It provided no benefit as far as they were concerned and it cost them time, effort, and power to provide it. They reasoned that the customer could provide their own time servers and own the issues themselves. That is probably an exercise in properly setting expectations at the start, though. Provide a stratum 3 service and tell people that one of the sources is subject to disappearing from time to time as a function of regular maintenance and folks should be fine with that or do it themselves.