Setting up NTP within small environment

[hellsbells]

I have been asked to set up a number of servers within a few small environments to run ntp.

I have only ever done this in Solaris before, but I now need to do this mainly on AIX5L machines, but also Windows 2000 and RHL7.2 and 8 machines.

I am unsure as to what to do to set up a server within each environment and how to point the other servers to get their time from this server.

Can anyone help a complete novice please?

 

[Gloups]

Hi
I' dont realy know what you want to know, ntp is nearly the same indifferntly of the OS.

the main question is how many clients will use your ntp server ? And where your sever will take the time ?

For this last question that's not a problem of architecture, you can have the time by internet, a local GPS or DCF77 receiver or, in the worts case with you local clock.

To choose how many ntp peer servers you want or any stuff like that it depends on what you want to do with it.

 

[bi]

I set up xntp on a mixed unix environment. An HP system got the time from a master clock elsewhere. And my Solaris and AIX systems looked to the HP system for their times. There was no difference in what was needed on the Solaris and AIX systems. So, if you done this for Solaris, doing it for AIX and RedHat shouldn't be different.

For what to do on the Windows system, you might want to ask in a Windows forum.

 

[RockSun]

The easiest way to do this is on AIX is to have as you suggest a "group master" server, which would point to the master server (we use 2 GPS appliances from Symetricom and Truetime) to get it's time reference.

Then set each client up to point to the group server so that the members of the local small environment all share the same reference.

The built in xntpd is the service of choice to do this - look at /etc/ntp.conf.

For each client, enter a line which says:

server a.b.c.d

Where a.b.c.d is the IP address of the group server.

On the group server, in ntp.conf, put the same thing, but a.b.c.d would be your master time reference device (GPS, atomic clock, etc...)

Set the xntpd service to automatically start on every box, and you should then be fine.

Even better would be to have multiple "server" lines in the ntp.conf file, and that way xntpd would be even more accurate.

Most of my systems keep time to .001 seconds or less accuracy, depending on the hardware platform.

Check the firmware notes on RS/6000 support - I know some system/version combinations lose time if not updated (p690).

Obviously this is a minimalist setup - there are options for security, keying, etc...

Doing the above will allow anyone to obtain a time reference from any machine running xntpd.

I wouldn't bother downloading any 3rd party ntp code, as the xntpd service seems fine, and you will be able to get full support from IBM on it.

See the man page for details.

On Win2k and XP I think we use the windows time service pointed to the PDC (which synchronizes to GPS servers), but I'm not a Windows guru, So I'd have to check.

Thanks,
Dan