I’m planning to setup an NTP service in my lab, and joining it to the pool for public access. My plan is to run an internal/private Statum 1 appliance with a GPS sync, and then below that add one or more stratum 2 servers in my DMZ to join the pool. However, as I only have 1 public IP address, I can…

How would you ensure that the same client always arrives at the same server?

TL;DR: Your instincts are right. Load balancing NTP doesn’t make sense, and can do more harm than good. RFC8633 (NTP Best Current Practice) has a section on anycast, and the same considerations apply to load balancers. If you have only one public IP address, expose just one stratum 2 server to the…

If your main goal is availability, you can use your load balancer’s failover mechanisms to only send traffic to one server at a time.

I use 4 servers and they are all called with ntp.heppen.be, so they devide the load. My primary server is GPS+PPS and all other connect to stratum1 servers as well. However, I do not load-balance over 1-IP-adress, that isn’t usefull at all. I load-balance via DNS over 4 different servers. My load…

How do you use Round Robin DNS balancing if the pool directly distributes the server’s IP address instead of the domain?

Well it’s quite simple to do. You just make 4 A-records in your domein for e.g. ntp.yourdomein.org but every entry points to a different IP. After you done that, you can check your round-robin with nslookup and it will do this: root@server:~# nslookup ntp.heppen.be Server: 192.168.1.1 Address:…

Does load-balancing make sense for NTP?

Server operators

kenyon August 5, 2020, 5:23pm 5

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Does load-balancing make sense for NTP?

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