Here's what I like. Find your 2 or 3 best timekeepers.
Make your best one the "master" for your network. You have 2 choices to make: - assign its local refclock stratum to 2 "worse" than the worst you ever expect to see from the servers it listens to - tell it to never advertise itself as better than S8 (assuming you have its local refclock at S10) Take your 2nd best server and have it sync to your master and whatever other machines you like, and assign its local refclock to a stratum 2 worse than your master. If you have a 3rd best server, assign its local refclock a stratum 2 worse than your #2 server. The reason for this is that if there is an upstream problem your primary server will drop 1 lower and then everybody will sync to this one box. If this box has problems, there will be a bit of a dance and everybody will sync to the #2 box. If you use S10 for the 1st box and S12 for your 2nd box, you will be as s14 for your 3rd box, which means your 3rd box will advertise itself at S15 and you are already a bottom-feeder at that point. This also means that if you are ordinarily listening to S1 or S2 servers that there is a Long Dance as folks "wind down" the stratum chain to your S10 and that gives plenty of opportunity for "cliques" to form, and it can get ugly as the cliques start to disagree on the time. By using this "worse by 2" you minimize/avoid these cliques. I like to have all my ntpd's sync with one another, mostly because 'ntpq -p' will show me any problems. Unless you are very sure of how an S1 is set up, I recommend syncing to S2 boxes only as they are generally much better about talking to multiple S1/S2 boxes and exhibit much better behavior when things "go wrong". H _______________________________________________ questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ntp.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
