At risk of stirring up a hornets' nest: The RFC unequivocally states that "A primary server is synchronized to a reference clock directly traceable to UTC."
IMO, that is not a necessary condition. If I have a hierarchy of NTP servers and clients with no external connection to the Internet and I feed in Northern Bongosooziland Spring Time (NBST) at the top of the hierarchy, NTP will propagate that time throughout the hierarchy. The only condition is that NBST must tick at a rate of approximately 1 second per UTC second, otherwise the finely-tuned FLL and PLL will not perform optimally. Many users of this list have a requirement to synchronize a number of machines within some user-defined limit, but they don't care if they are all offset from UTC by a few minutes. Time islands would seem to be a common use-case, and it's my opinion that the RFC's assertion that genuine NTP networks must be based on UTC is an unnecessary restriction. I suggest that the RFC should mention that UTC-based NTP is probably the most valuable use-case, and is the only form of NTP that should be allowed on the Internet, whilst admitting the existence of time islands. Paul _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions
