Like a network of public NTP servers, an internal time-server platform should be synchronized to multiple reference clocks. And you should deploy multiple Stratum 2 NTP servers that offer multiple paths to the Stratum 1 server.
Timing It Right
So how do you go NTP? First, set up the NTP daemon (see "Step by Step," below), which is available at www.ntp.org. When an NTP client or server first initiates synchronization, it needs to establish which time servers it will use, and that's defined in the ntp.conf file. Next, the NTP daemon needs to determine the properties of the local clock. Within about 15 minutes, the NTP client is synchronized with the NTP server.
The alternative to NTP is SNTP, which comes packaged with Windows 2000. At the protocol level, SNTP is just like NTP, and NTP servers can answer SNTP or NTP queries. But SNTP's timing algorithms for determining time offsets and resolution and redundancy features are different from NTP.
The SNTP client takes the time stamp at face value and sets the clock accordingly, without the in-depth validation process that NTP uses. SNTP should not be used with multiple NTP and SNTP servers because it doesn't have the algorithms to determine the best time source. And in contrast to NTP, SNTP synchronizes down to the nearest second rather than the nearest millisecond.
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