The NTP Pool
The NTP Pool Project is an amazing piece of infrastructure on the Internet. Most people don’t even realize that they are making use of it, but in fact a huge number of Linux distributions (amongst others Fedora, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS) and Internet providers all around the world use the pool to synchronize system clocks in computers, routers and other devices with accurate time information.
The pool is driven by volunteers who invest a little bit of their bandwidth and a tiny little bit of CPU power in running the ntpd software and exposing it to the NTP Pool. When you’ve installed ntpd on a box, you can add its IP address to the pool database. Every once in a while the IP will then be added to the DNS zones for *.pool.ntp.org and devices using the pool will query your server for time information then. The Wikipedia article provides a bit more information about how it works.
I have been running a box in the pool for quite some time now and am pretty satisfied with it: The CPU usage is negligible (ntpd is well optimized in this regard) and other services running on the same box (SMTP, HTTP etc.) consume significantly more bandwidth than what is spent on NTP traffic. And who cares about bandwidth these days?
So: Have some box with a static IP address sitting around somewhere? Go sign up for the NTP pool!
You can even use a box that sits behind a DSL connection, but in this case you should make sure that you really have a static IP address and that your NAT box is capable of handling all the packets coming in and leaving when your machine is in one of the *.pool.ntp.org DNS zones. And if you like playing with exotic hardware, you can probably get your hands on brand-new GPS time hardware provided by Meinberg once you’ve joined.
An incredible number of things on the Internet can be improved. Joining the NTP pool may be a step in the right direction.
