Question about internal 'private' servers

[Dave Hall]

Hal,

Some further updates and thoughts:

Regarding the tos minclock config line:  I checked one of my systems that's
still running Debian 11 and regular NTP.  This system was quite happy with
only two servers.  So my original two-maaster-server configuration was OK
(but not great) until I upgraded to NTPSEC.  This is not a complaint - just
me understanding how the problem crept in on me.

Regarding the number of local masters:  I completely understand why 4 is a
realistic minimum.  Now that this has been pointed out to me I will plan to
move back to 4 or more in the very near future.  Last night, due to
other pressing issues, I just needed to get my clocks synchronized without
thinking about (planning for) which additional hosts to use as masters.

Regarding my question about using a local POOL, my idea is that I could
change the pool membership via DNS without having to touch a config file on
each system.  So a pool of 2 servers does seem pointless, but when I add 3
or 4 more it will be easy.

-Dave

--
Dave Hall
Binghamton University
kdhall at binghamton.edu

On Wed, Jan 15, 2025 at 10:31 PM Hal Murray <halmurray at sonic.net> wrote:

>
> > One last question:  What does it take to define a POOL?  Is it just a DNS
> > name that resolves to more than one IP, or is there something more?
>
> The general idea is that there are many servers in the pool and there is
> some smarts behind the DNS server that will rotate through the servers to
> spread the load (maybe not equally) and will monitor the available servers
> and not use any that are not responding or have a clock that is way off
> (aka broken).
>
> More info here:
>   https://www.ntppool.org/en/
>
> The client side will try again later when it wants more servers and toss
> out a server from the pool when it stops responding.
>
> If you look in your log files, you will probably find lots of clutter.
>
> In your case, with only 2 servers in the pool, I would use 2 server lines
> rather than the pool.
>
>
> --
> These are my opinions.  I hate spam.
>
>
>
>
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