09.17.05
Joining pool.ntp.org
As pool.ntp.org website states:
The pool.ntp.org project is a big virtual cluster of timeservers striving to provide reliable easy to use NTP service for millions of clients without putting a strain on the big popular timeservers
I’m using this service for ages, and one day I though that it was fair to contribute a really minimal amount of bandwidth to help improving the overall reliability of pool.ntp.org… well at least pool.europe.ntp.org 
I’ve measured the instant and average bitrate in KB with mesure, these are the results:
# time ./mesure -i eth0 -K -p "udp and port 123" 49 real 0m59.546s # time ./mesure -i eth0 -K -a -p "udp and port 123" 0 real 4m52.314s
As you see, it’s just ~1KB/s of “lost” bandwidth… as I said, minimal. Of course I’ve to do further measurements using MRTG for instance, to see how it behaves during days and months, but I’m confident that I’m not going to see a sudden raise on bandwidth usage.
The joining process is completely painless, just an email @ (with confirmation mail) and password have to be supplied, and you’ve got to change pool.ntp.org server and choose 3-5 static stratum 2 hosts from a list, this policy assures an acceptable quality of service.
In exchange for the bandwidth, they provide a couple of interesting stats too evaluate my ntp server quality… I hope that I’ve convinced you to join, see you there ! 