[olug] NTPd w/modem support

[Daniel Linder]

> I would just get a GPS time card and make you own stratum 1 ntpd server.
> The cards are relatively cheap these days.  I think I've seen them as low
> as $300 for a simple PCI card.  You can get a rackmount ntp "appliance"
> for $1-2K.

Or you could look into one of the many serial-attached GPS units that are
sold in BestBuy/CircuitCity/CompUSA/etc.  A played with one for a while
and if you are just looking for something within a fraction of a second
(one tenth of a second or so), then a perl script called periodically that
read the GPS units time would do ya for a lot less cash.

Once you get a server with a good clock in it, use NTP on the local LAN to
synchronize everything to it.  Hint: have one master clock and everything
else as slaves to it.  NTP allows a "peering" arrangment and the network
average is used, but it is a real pain to keep working -- at least that
was my experience with Sun/Linux/Cisco equipment trying to synch off of
each other. :(

NTP is really great so your equipment logs are synchronized down to the
second for comparison across different devices.

Dan