[ednog] Building a cheap NTP stratum-2 network with retired Ciscogear

Nicola Foggi nfoggi at depaul.edu
Mon Jun 27 13:15:22 EDT 2005


>In my particular case, we're using cheap cisco gear that is no longer
>in service on the production network.  Previously I used some 2600
>routers and now at NU I'm using cat 3524 switches.  Using at least
>four 3524's, we'll have something that will look like this (where the
>3524's are ntp1, ntp2, ntp3 and ntp4 in the diagram - all peered to
>each other):

The 2600's have been working great, I would think a 3524 would do just
fine also... if not, maybe a 3550... but prices of 1700's are so cheap
also, that it would be a good alternative probably.

We don't monitor them too much, we should probably check there time vs
there peer's time, but haven't done that yet (and thankfully it hasn't
been a problem yet).  We do monitor there peer's for availability, and
for the most part we haven't had any problems.

Our problem is getting people to use them.  Last I checked, our
"standard desktop image" was set to use them, however, the Novell client
will also sync the time, along with a recently deployed Altiris client. 
The problem we ran into was that the "clients" overrode the "os" time,
so when the novell or altiris servers were off, all the desktops were
off.  I couldn't find a knob in XP to disable updates, though I can turn
off the altiris agent update.  We're switching to a Microsoft ADS
enviroment, so I'm not sure if it behaves the same as the novell
enviroment.

It's nice to have them on dedicated hardware vs shared on a linux box
(as they were previosuly)....

Nicola


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