[c-nsp] NTP Servers

[Chuck Church]

We've used 6500s (Sup2 then Sup720) to provide time for 200+ internal
clients for years, never had an issue.  This is our core router providing
time at our largest site to perhaps 400 devices:

327     3011968  40515977         74  0.00%  0.00%  0.00%   0 NTP

It's pretty efficient, but we're not doing authentication either.  For
thousands of devices, an appliance might be better, though a modern ISR with
a fast CPU (probably want a calendar chip in it) would probably be fine too.
Note that Cisco doesn't seem to support the advanced features of NTPv4 from
what I can tell such as PKI-based auth.  An appliance is apt to support
those.  The beauty of most appliances is that they're easy to manage.  If it
fails, download the latest ISO from company, burn it, boot appliance,
restore it and you're back in business in an hour or so.  Keep in mind a
linux kernel running just ntpd and some management necessities like ssh and
http is pretty reliable.  Hardly any I/O, just a simple function it does.  

Chuck

-----Original Message-----
From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net
[mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Andrew Miehs
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2012 7:14 PM
To: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: [c-nsp] NTP Servers

Hi Guys

Perhaps a little off topic -

Are any of you using NTP appliances? I am in an enterprise environment. We
have also considered using a couple of my 6500s but my gut tells me that is
not a good thing (tm).

We will be getting a stratum 1 feed from a local datacenter provider - and
was looking at the various NTP boxes around - many of which with the ability
to take a GSM clock source.
Any thoughts on which one of these is stable?


Thanks

Andrew
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