Time Clock

[John Payne_2]

Anyone purchased a time clock? We are looking for a GPS clock...

If you have purchased, ease of install and speed of delivery?

John

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

HI John:

I have used a GPS NTP Time Server made by TrueTime. http://www.truetime.net/ It was a piece of cake to use, I just pointed my time servers at it and that was it. Of course, if all you need is accuracy to about 200msec or so
then it's hard to beat the U.S. Naval Observatory and the price is right. You can point your main time server to this and let the other timeservers sync to your main timeserver which in turns sync to USNO.

[Ron Kinner]

Hardest thing about the install was getting up on the roof to hook up the antenna. The rest of it was pretty easy. Just had to plug up a terminal and tell it what sort of service you wanted. That was back in 98 when I was installing them for the Air Force. You probably don't need antennas anymore.

The Air Force ones had serial connectors on them which is not the best way to go and the one we have here at work requires special cards for the PCs which is also a pain. Better to get one with an Ethernet connections that acts as an ntp server. Then you just set the ip address and mask and gateway and you are good to go.

Ron

[Bill Hassell]

If you are connected to the Internet via a firewall, you may find that the firewall already has a time source or can be configured to be a time source. Once the firewall is setup, it will keep time accurate to less than 128ms and can serve thousands of clients. Just setup ntp on HP-UX and you're set.

[John Payne_2]

Yeah, we are a university, and we used to pull time off the routers. Then a year and a half ago, the network guys turned ntp off on the routers and did not tell us. A year ago I set up two servers to pull from the navy, but a couple of months ago, we had a board replaced and the clock on one of them was screwed up for a couple of months. Being a University, the management wants a clock on site that we can use for time. That way we can also control it, and no one will turn ntp off on us again.