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I wonder how much of the world depends on GPS timesources for their time servers -- what would happen if GPS goes down? Though I suppose that anyone that has s

I wonder how much of the world depends on GPS timesources for their time servers -- what would happen if GPS goes down? Though I suppose that anyone that has strict time needs has multi-protocol GPS / GLONASS / Galileo / BeiDo receivers so it would take a huge disaster to knock out the time signal entirely.

Johnny555 5y ago
Coincidentally, Facebook just released a solution to this problem: To remove these dependencies, we’ve built a new dedicated piece of hardware called Time Appliance, which consists of a GNSS receiver and a miniaturized atomic clock (MAC). Users of time appliances can keep accurate time, even in the event of GNSS connectivity loss. While building our Time Appliance, we also invented a Time Card, a PCIe card that can turn any commodity server into a time appliance. https://engineering.fb.com/2021/08/11/open-source/time-appliance/ https://engineering.fb.com/2021/08/11/open-source/time-appli... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28140732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28140732 I didn't even know that a "Miniaturized Atomic Clock" was a thing. Looks like they cost a couple thousand dollars, but that's probably not a bad price for what you get. https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14830 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14830