In reply to everyone (but mostly Mark Spencer):

> Does your "cave" have any connectivity to the outside world ?

The cave has network connectivity, and is "network close" (but not physically 
close) to a high-quality surveyed GPS disciplined stratum 1 NTP server which we 
have permission to run off of.  The cave is actually partially underground, and 
the bit that isn't has building on top of it.  CDMA comes in enough to make 
your phone ring or receive a text, but phone calls are all "I'm amazed it 
didn't drop ye[call dropped]".  Antenna runs for GPS are not an option (I 
asked); it's too expensive/hard to get permission/too long, depending on which 
route to sky you want to take.

> Are there any places your cave has connectivity to that might 
> have enough of a sky view to provide periodic gps coverage ?

See above, but yes.

> Do you need a COTS (commercial off the shelf) solution or 
> can you accept something that has been kludged together ?

I can accept "semi-kludge".  Custom firmware on a model xyz phone sourced from 
ebay with a mere 5 wires soldered is great for fun time (and for fun I'd love 
to try it), but not so much for this.  Single COTS would be great (yeah, and I 
want a side of fries with my flying unicorn), but "here's two (or 3, or n) COTS 
things you usually won't plug together, but..." is fine.  Maybe 1 soldered 
wire....

> Do you need a Peng or other professional to sign off on 
> the solution ?

Thank goodness no.  We also don't need traceability to NIST either.

 A bit more information that people requested.  We only need to be 1ms to UTC 
(100us would make some people happier, but then so would a GPS antenna run).  
The PTP sync inside the cluster, however, needs to be tight (sub 1 us if 
possible).  Holdover isn't critical (24 hour OK, weekend better, month is 
overkill) so long as sync within the cluster remains tight.  The cluster itself 
has proper hardware PTP support (NICs and switches) throughout, and is "low 
radius" -- 2 switch traversals from the grandmaster to each node tops.

As for everyone's comments so far, it seems that there is an assumption that 
any PTP master worth its salt will keep its slaves tightly synced to 
one-another even if it has lousy sync to UTC.  Am I reading between the lines 
correctly?

Thanks for the help so far.  

-Joe
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