Network time pool tops 1,000 servers

[Alpine]

But still looking for volunteers

THE NTP POOL project has reached the 1,000 servers milestone, but it's still looking for more volunteers.


NTP stands for the Network Time Protocol service that runs over the Internet on TCP/IP port 123 and keeps computer clocks worldwide synchronized with international atomic clock time reference standards that are maintained by the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL), US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Naval Observatory (USNO), the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PT in Germany, and in other countries.

The NTP Pool Project was started in the wake of the massive proliferation of business and personal computers during the 1990's in order to address the rapidly increasing workloads on the reference time servers. The NTP pool shares out the worldwide time signal workload via a distributed hierarchy of time servers run by volunteer companies and individuals. As the project introduces itself:

"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."

NTP pool servers are classified by zone, with the Global zone having the most (847), followed by Europe (636), North America (297), Oceania (44), Asia (42), South America (13) and Africa (2). The NTP Pool is the world's default public time service used daily by millions of computer systems.

Free NTP Pool client software is included most major Linux distributions and is also available for Windows, BSD Unix (which might include Apple OS/X), proprietary Unix systems like AIX and Solaris, and maybe more. Information about using the NTP Pool is available here.

The total number of computers in the world continues to increase, so the NTP Pool Project is still looking for more volunteers willing to donate minimal computer cycles and bandwidth by running timeservers.

All you need to join the NTP Pool is a static IP address and a system that's fairly reliable and remains up all the time. An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) might be a good idea too, but isn't required. If you might like to join, go here.
The INQuirer