[c-nsp] NTP Servers

[Saku Ytti]

On (2012-06-25 10:50 -0400), Josh Baird wrote:

> And guess what the Infoblox appliances run?  :)

Earlier poster also wondered why waste money on "NTP appliance'. Some of
these appliances have hardware timestamping, which will significantly
increase accuracy, if your network is low-jitter and low-delay (like most
HW switched networks today are).

Curiously at least on ingress side your random NIC can support HW
timestamping today, and IIRC even egress. Couldn't be arsed to surf
intel.com through the datasheets.
I wonder if the NIC HW timestamping function is flexible enough to inject
timestamp in NTP packets as very first thing in ingress and very last thing
as egress. And if there is way to give the NIC accurate timing somehow.

Probably quickly becomes cheaper to buy some appliance than try to figure
out how to hack this in NIC driver, possibly kernel and NTPd.
-- 
  ++ytti