Friday, May 22nd, 2009

The NTP Pool Project, in their own words, “… is a big virtual cluster of timeservers striving to provide reliable easy to use NTP service for millions of clients without putting a strain on the big popular timeservers”.

I’ve been using the NTP pool on servers and workstations for years and have recently decided to give something back to the project that’s been so helpful to me. So as of yesterday, one of my servers is part of the pool. You can see my server’s statistics on the NTP pool web site.

How to use the NTP pool

Using the pool is easy: Just set your system’s timeserver to pool.ntp.org. Or, for better results, use one of the geographic zones such as us.pool.ntp.org (for the US), de.pool.ntp.org (for Germany), etc. In addition to the top-level global zone, there are zones for each continent, and many country-level zones to choose from. My server is in the global, North America, and US zones.

The system works by using round-robin DNS to return a random IP address each time you resolve a *.pool.ntp.org hostname, which spreads the load over the entire network of time servers (additional scoring is done based on a number of other factors, but that’s the high-level overview).

More about using the NTP pool.

How to join the NTP pool

To participate in the pool, you’ll need to configure your NTP daemon to sync with a few stratum 2 time servers, and then respond to outside requests. I won’t go into the details here but it’s a fairly simple process and is outlined well on the NTP pool web site.

More information on joining the pool.

If you’ve got a server with some cycles and bandwidth to spare, consider joining the pool. The resource usage is minimal so it shouldn’t have much, if any impact on the real work your server is doing. Servers are especially needed in Africa and South America, but North America has fallen pretty far behind Europe as well so no matter where you are, you can help.