On 12/11/14, 8:11 AM, Brian Lloyd wrote:
Discussing the lifetime of NTP server hardware is all well and good but
given the thrust of this list, i.e. individual time-nuttery, I don't see it
as being too germane. Few of us have the same problems that Jim Lux has at
JPL.
Actually, I think my point was that the problems I face at JPL are
essentially identical to the problems we face at home. I'm not in the
time and frequency group (and I don't know that they actually are better
off.. although they do have rooms full of good clocks), so in our areas,
we tend to have little point solutions to problems.
It's not like there's a big time/frequency infrastructure with *free*
spigots from the maser in every lab. You have to pay for this stuff on
your project funds, and a lot of times, it seems easier to find a one
time expense (summer hire intern!) than sign up for a perpetual monthly
charge plus the infrastructure change cost to pull the fiber/coax.
We do have NTP, of course. But network drops are about $30-40/month, so
in a lab, you might decide, hey, I can buy a widget for a few hundred
dollars, and I'll have a better than NTP time source forever. And if
you've got a student hire, buying that $200 unit off eBay or Amazon and
taping a GPS antenna to the window starts to look pretty attractive.
There's probably more than a 100 (certainly dozens) of little GPS
antennas all over the lab connected to a bewildering variety of
time/frequency sources in labs. Sure, there's a goodly number of
TrueTime/Fluke/Pendulum/Symmetricom boxes of various vintages and
models, but there's also all manner of home-grown stuff.
Those student projects.. What a great way to get someone in for a few
months on a sort of trial basis. They get a really nice senior project
and you both get to find out if JPL is the kind of place they'd like to
work. I will confess that the only student intern who I had doing a
timing related project didn't really become imbued with the true
fascination for time and time transfer that I was hoping. On the other
hand, it is truly a niche.. people often don't appreciate how important
it is, and how widely used it is.)
I want to have a good time and frequency source in my little network that I
run. I can put an extra BBB or two aside to run NTP. Eventually I will want
to replace it but I bet that there will be an adequate SBC and free OS to
do that when need arises.
Which is exactly what we do at work.. Lots of old PCs doing something,
but there's that "what do we do when the PC fails" question. Just like
at home, you've got a limited budget and time available. Do you stock a
couple extra BBBs or RPis? That costs money, and you need to have a
place to store them where you'll be able to find them.
Or do you hope that when it fails 5 years hence, you'll have time and
budget to rebuild?
So, I am still looking for a straight-forward, "here is a really good way
to use a BBB coupled to a GPS 1pps to do NTP," treatise. Better still if
someone is using their LTE-lite to do it. It seems like a nice little
package for the amateur time-nut for everyday time and frequency keeping.
Essentially, you want the equivalent of a Microsemi
(Symmetricom/TrueTime) XL-GPS with the right options for, say, $500 or less.
I do too.
But I'm also not under any illusion that when my homegrown unit fails
that I'll be able to fix it, or rebuild it for the same price. It will
depend on someone having done the redesign using whatever is available
then, and published the cookbook.
Oh, and if it has nixie tubes to display current time, umso besser! After
all, I still need to set my old-style watch and a few mechanical
chronographs I have kicking around.
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