I’m looking for NTP stratum 1 servers in India for my stratum 2 pool server. NPL India is not reachable(unclear why). Most other stratum 1’s I find are too distant or are inaccurate.
Any suggestions?
Hi Steve,
I found a few servers…
time.nplindia.org: stratum 1
time.nplindia.in: stratum 1
samay1.nic.in: stratum 2
samay2.nic.in: stratum 2
ntp.iitb.ac.in: run by IIT Bombay - stratum 2
Try those.
They all work:
www.time.nplindia.org 3 3 260 -9.457 15692.388 +13ms 3644us
mail.nplindia.org 2 0 259 +0.174 2000.000 +9826us 4000ms
ntp.nic.in 1 0 0 +0.026 2000.000 -23ms 4000ms
164.100.255.123 3 3 194 -39.369 19693.908 -22ms 4499us
ntp.iitb.ac.in 5 4 260 -21.120 49.167 +22ms 920us
It’s bad in Europe…but okay that is a long path:
^- www.time.nplindia.org 1 6 317 79 -26ms[ -26ms] +/- 137ms
^- mail.nplindia.org 1 6 212 146 +8655us[+8651us] +/- 106ms
^- ntp.nic.in 2 6 26 146 -25ms[ -25ms] +/- 160ms
^? 164.100.255.123 2 7 260 341 -16ms[ -16ms] +/- 156ms
^- ntp.iitb.ac.in 2 6 377 16 +28ms[ +28ms] +/- 379ms
But they work. Shouldn’t matter if they are STR1 or STR2. You may want to test them.
Bas, For my purposes stratum 1 is a must.
My VMs (one Vultr, one Digital Ocean) cannot reach time.nplindia.org. I’ve reached out to NPL India, but so far no response. I’ve also opened a ticket with the hosting company and am waiting for a response.
Google & Apple don’t operate stratum 1’s in India, as far as I can tell.
Explain why STR1 is a must…as it makes no difference STR2 unless you youself run STR1.
A remote STR1 is the same as a remote STR2 or even STR3.
Else you need to install your own GPS there, then you have real STR1.
I cannot afford to install a stratum 1 host in India.
I think there might be at least three IP addresses for NPL India:
14.139.60.103
14.139.60.106
14.139.60.107
If none of those are reachable, maybe try time.google.com? I suppose they have a local presence in India as well. Yes, they do leap second smearing and as such those servers are not particularly suitable for use in the NTP pool, but I’m sure you understand the pros and cons.
Edit: Sorry, I didn’t read your previous message where you said that Google doesn’t operate NTP servers in India. My bad.
All three addresses are blocked.
Maybe I should have said that Google NTP servers are not nearby rather than not located in India.
Google uses anycast, which complicates matters. Google IP4/IP6 NTP responds but is 70-90 msec away with a lot of jitter. Ping responds in under 2msec, but you can’t trust this.
Did you tried cloudflare ?
162.159.200.123
162.159.200.1
They are also anycast server and as far as i know the only in those zone where a drop/exist exists - but those aren’t S1 IIRC S4
Cloudflare servers are stratum 3. I don’t know if they can be trusted.
Ohh. they have changed their level 
Last year the where S4.
Looks like India don’t have much official S1 servers :-/
Maybe try stratum 1 servers from nearby country? nets.org.sg from Singapore for example.
Thanks for the various suggestions. I’ll seek a different cloud provider in India that has better NTP access.
I found these NTP stratum 1 servers being part of the in.pool.ntp.org zone:
14.139.60.103 refid [PPS], delay 0.17987, dispersion 0.00008 offset 0.004788
2001:1600:4:1::f refid [GPS], delay 0.03183, dispersion 0.00002 offset 0.001185
14.139.60.106 refid [PPS], delay 0.18008, dispersion 0.00035 offset 0.004674
14.139.60.107 refid [PPS], delay 0.17403, dispersion 0.00015 offset 0.004819
.103, .106 and .107 were already mentioned earlier, and 2001:1600:4:1::f is actually in Switzerland.
It may depend, as you say, on the hosting provider. My server in OVH cloud ( pool.ntp.org: Statistics for 148.113.16.33 ) is able to get the time fine.
$ ntp-rtt -c -r time.nplindia.org
Remote Name, Stratum, RTT, Root Delay, Root Dispersion, Kiss Code
time.nplindia.org(14.139.60.107), 1, 26.960693ms, 0s, 1.00708ms, ""
time.nplindia.org(14.139.60.103), 1, 33.91651ms, 0s, 1.037598ms, ""
time.nplindia.org(14.139.60.106), 1, 26.89244ms, 0s, 991.821µs, ""
Depending on how you feel you can always build your own stratum 1 server using Azure. See Under-provisioned countries? - #5 by gombadi on setting one up. Or if you want to use AWS you can setup a server in Asia Pacific (Malaysia) or Asia Pacific (Thailand) - Set the time reference on your EC2 instance to use the local Amazon Time Sync Service - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Those do of course cost some dollars.
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions!
The support teams at my VM providers found no issue at their ends, so the problem seems to be on the NPL India side.
I’ve configured an AWS VM & it has no trouble reaching NPL India. The local AWS time service (169.254.169.123) seems to be good, but it is stratum 3.
I investigated several Microsoft Azure systems in the past couple of years, but do not recommend them for timing purposes. See https://weberblog.net/azure-ptp-accuracy/ A PTP-like mechanism can synchronize the VM with the hypervisor (HyperV), however in every case I tried the hypervisor itself was poorly synchronized. Network routing is also peculiar.
Milesweb is pretty cheap, VPS for 3,25 euro/month when rented for 24 months.
If you use the PHC on AWS, it’s much better than the one available on Azure. I’m sure we’ve talked about this before, but there are full details in my blog posts.
I’ve used PHC (PTP Hardware Clock) on AWS previously. It works well, but requires a more expensive VM.
Not if you use the KVM PHC - works on any Nitro x86_64 instance, including t3a.micro.