3 ms·
I know this is HN, but the internet is pretty low on the list of things NIST time standards are important for.
by adastra22 11mo ago
I know this is HN, but the internet is pretty low on the list of things NIST time standards are important for.
- willis936 11mo agoBut pretty high on the list that NIST NTP is important for (since it leaves the building through the internet).
- adastra22 11mo agoIf NIST NTP goes down, the internet doesn’t go down. But atomic clocks drifting does upset many scientific experiments, which would effectively go down for the duration of the outage.
- willis936 11mo agoThis is the reason GP listed out all the alternative robust NTP services that are GPS disciplined, freely available, and used as redundant sources by any responsible timekeeper. What atomic clocks are disciplined by NTP anyway? Local GPS disciplining is the standard. If you're using NTP you don't need precision or accuracy in your timekeeping.
- szundi 11mo ago[dead]
- willis936 11mo agoAlso, I forgot to mention that NIST offers (and many institutions use) a service that provides a local rubidium reference that is GPS disciplined and they give you monthly reports that tell you the offset of the timestamps that were reported so they can be corrected. These services did not suffer interruptions.
- _zoltan_ 11mo agocould you list 3 things that you think are more important than the internet? (I know the internet is going to be fine; I just want to understand what you think ranks higher globally...)
- adastra22 11mo agoMostly scientific stuff like astronomical observations — e.g. did this event observed at one telescope coincide with neutrinos detected at this other observatory. Note I didn’t say they are more important than the Internet. That’s a value judgement in any case. I said that NIST level 0 NTp servers are more important to these use cases than they are to the Internet.
- misnome 11mo agoAll these use at least GPS for timing
- adastra22 11mo agoNo, they don’t. GPS is orders of magnitude less reliable than the most up to date metric time synchronization over fixed topology fiber links.
- misnome 11mo agoI wonder why we bothered building GPS signal waveguides into the bottom of a mine then. Clearly we should have consulted the experts of hacker news first. Losing NTP for a day is going to affect fuck-all.
- AlotOfReading 11mo agoI'm not even sure why you're trying to argue this. It's well established that Time over Fiber is 1-2 orders of magnitude more accurate and precise than GNSS time. Fiber time is also immune to many of the numerous sources of interference GNSS systems encounter, which anyone who's done serious timekeeping will be well acquainted with.
- 2snakes 11mo agoIn a past job I set up at least 5 domain dns servers pointing at nist ntp…