
On Sun, 24 Oct 2010, Brandon Kim wrote:
By local I meant in-house, on-site in our datacenter.
What do you think it means to have a NTP server in-house, on-site in your datacenter? There all many different levels of NTP servers. Putting some free software on a spare computer, and synchronizing it to a few public NTP servers on the Internet? Or buying a $5,000 specialized NTP hardware device (or more if you want backups) and installing an external antenna to pick up a radio reference clock source from a satellite or radio station? If you already provide DNS/DHCP and other services in your datacenter, its usually not that much effort to add the NTP service. In many cases, the software is already part of the base operating system package, or easily added to most modern systems. But in most cases, NTP seems to be treated as an unsupported service. If it works, great. If it doesn't, don't complain. If the person who cared about NTP leaves, no one else even knows it exists. If you need traceable time, or have some other regulatory requirement, its going to be more work. My point is there isn't one answer.