Meraka Institute NTP Time Servers

Access Policy

Open to anyone. If you are only synchronizing a single machine, please use one of the stratum 2 servers. They are getting their time from a variety of servers and should be pretty immune to single machine failures.

Stratum 1 machines

Stratum 2 machines

Contact

About the servers

Although the machines belong to the Meraka Institute, this isn't an official service, so if you have problems or queries, please send them to me at the contact address above.

tick.meraka.csir.co.za

This is an Avila ARM board from Gateworks running FreeBSD 8.1 with ntp-4.2.4p5. It is synchronized from a Motorola Oncore UT+. It is dedicated to providing time services. At the moment it stays within less that a microsecond of the PPS signal from the UT+ most of the time. It only struggles with that when the temperature changes too quickly.
Oncore UT+

tock.meraka.csir.co.za

This is a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 running FreeBSD 9.0 with ntp-4.2.4p5. It is synchronized from the same Motorola Oncore UT+ as tick.meraka.csir.co.za. This machine is not dedicated to providing time services only. It is also doing other jobs, so it might not be as available as tick and it might have a high load at times and thus more jitter.

orca.cids.org.za

This is my test box at home. It is a dual 100MHz P5 running FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT. It normally runs the latest version of ntp and because I'm also trying new things on it, it might not be very stable or give the correct time! I'm merely providing the reference to it so that you can see what is possible or what you should avoid. :-) At the moment it is synchronized from an Oncore UT+ and it's got a little home made timer/counter board to measure the interrupt latency and jitter of the pps interrupt handler so that we can compensate for that. Look here for a little history of things that I tried.

Performance

Here is some performance graphs of the previous few days for some of the machines:
  • tick.meraka.csir.co.za
  • tock.meraka.csir.co.za
  • ntp1.meraka.csir.co.za
  • ntp2.meraka.csir.co.za
  • orca.cids.org.za (my test machine at home)

    Links to other time related sites

  • SA Time site
  • The Main NTP site (The home of the ntp distributions.)
  • USNO GPS site
  • NTP documentation as it comes with the distribution.
  • Time Synchronization Software.
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    Comments and suggestions to: jhay at meraka.csir.co.za
    Last changed: 2016-10-15