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 ! ;)