On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 11:57:39PM -0400, John Todd wrote:
Hmm... $2400 is still in the "pricey" range to be throwing out bunches of these across a network in wide distribution. (Pardon me if some of you on the list snicker at my reluctance at the $2400 price - for some of us the "new, new Econcomy" is making things like NTP Stratum 1 clocks a luxury that The Budgeters doesn't see as necessary, since it's an invisible engineering issue.)
Is it invisible? Proper timing is essential. It's not too hard to pick a suitable GPS and plug it into a host somewhere if cost is an issue. But, more to the point, you don't need a "wide distribution" of these boxes. 2 or 3 is more than enough. I tend to use my top level routers, or some distributed hosts (dns, authentication, logging, you name it) to form a stratum 2 mesh, and then have the rest of your network talk to them. A large number of stratum 2 servers talking to each other as well as a few stratum 1 clocks will result in a very stable distributed timesource that can support a whole lot of clients. You've already paid for the network, might as well use it. --msa