ellozy@FARBER.HARVARD.EDU (Mohamed Ellozy) (03/08/91)
Dave, The Internet is probably too big today for another "glorious experiment", but do you have any "feel" for how widely NTP is deployed? Do any vendors, other than DEC and TGV, ship it with their software? Mohamed
Mills@udel.edu (03/08/91)
Mohamed, I'm guessing at 5000 clients now, but HP and Sun both say they have "thousands" of machines on their internal net and believe most run NTP at least on reboot. Sun has announced plans to ship it in the next release and I hear TWG is doing that for Multinet. Dave
ken@HPSDLZ.SDD.HP.COM (Ken Stone) (03/08/91)
> I'm guessing at 5000 clients now, but HP and Sun both say they > have "thousands" of machines on their internal net and believe > most run NTP at least on reboot. Sun has announced plans to > ship it in the next release and I hear TWG is doing that for > Multinet. Dave ... I've been running a sort of "glorious experiment" within net 15 (HP) to try and determine how widespread the use of NTP really is. The results have been a little surprising. While I expected to see on the order of 2500 to 3000 hosts using ntp, what I found was a varying number that seems to run from 500 to 750 on the outside :-(. Its kind of a top heavy tree with as many as 30 strata 2's .... more data here as I determine it. The reason for this project is that we are working on a more optimal internal structure. Tools used include a mongo perl script and some mod'd binaries of ntp, xntpdc, and ntpq. -- Ken
bdale@COL.HP.COM (Bdale Garbee) (03/08/91)
> I've been running a sort of "glorious experiment" within net 15 (HP) > to try and determine how widespread the use of NTP really is. The > results have been a little surprising. While I expected to see on > the order of 2500 to 3000 hosts using ntp, what I found was a varying > number that seems to run from 500 to 750 on the outside :-(. I may be presumptuous to assume that I'm a typical HP internal site admin, but I have a multi-hundred machine site that is adopting NTP, and want to offer a thought or two on the subject. We've put up a stratum 2 and several stratum 3's on our site, and have turned on a few diskless servers at stratum 4... we ran into some initial configuration and learning problems which have since been resolved, and expect to turn on all remaining standalones and diskless servers at stratum 4 "real soon now". But even then, the numbers will seem low since we run a *lot* of diskless nodes, and HP's diskless code already does good time synchronization between diskless nodes and their servers. So we'll only have the servers running NTP... therefore the number of machines "synchronized by NTP" will really be an order of magnitude larger than the number of machines "running NTP" given our average diskless cluster size. Not sure anyone cares, but it always helps to know what you're counting... Bdale, N3EUA
tengi@princeton.edu (Christopher Tengi) (03/08/91)
In article <9103071709.aa15122@huey.udel.edu>, Mills@udel.edu writes: |> Mohamed, |> |> Sun has announced plans to |> ship it in the next release and I hear TWG is doing that for |> Multinet. |> Dave, FYI, NeXT's 2.0 release also includes an ntpd. It is configured using their netinfo system. I don't handle the NeXTs myself, so I can't give any details on how they get configured, but I believe that the daemon is derived from the ntp distribution on louie.udel.edu (whenever NeXT took their snapshot). -- ==========----------==========---------+---------==========----------========== UUCP: ...princeton!tengi VOICEnet: 609-258-6799 INTERNET: tengi@princeton.edu FAX: 609-258-3943 BITNET: TENGI@PUCC
anders@ifi.uio.no (Anders Ellefsrud) (03/09/91)
In article <9103072309.AA19633@hpsdlz.sdd.hp.com>, ken@HPSDLZ.SDD.HP.COM (Ken Stone) writes: > I've been running a sort of "glorious experiment" within net 15 (HP) > to try and determine how widespread the use of NTP really is. This inspired me for a little experiment (Norway is still small enough). I dug out all A-records from the no domain (Norway). All this hosts, a total of 5912 addresses, was sent an ntp packet. This included a bunch of routers, PC's, mac's, terminal-servers and other random equipment which I would not expect to respond to ntp packets anyway. I ran the test just once, so hosts beeing down or othervise unable to respond at the moment they where probed could skew the numbers slightly. Things with more than one ip-address was tested mulitiple times which also tend to introduce inaccuracies. Here are the numbers. Hosts running ntp: 466 Hosts not running ntp: 5446 Total number of hosts: 5912 This indicates that about 8% of all registered ``things'' with an ip-address in norway was running ntp and responding to ntp requests. -- anders@ifi.uio.no
syd@DSI.COM (Syd Weinstein) (03/09/91)
When talking about all the hosts running ntp, what consideration is made for those that don't need millisecond accuracy and just run ntpdate every couple of hours? All of our systems run ntpdate very hour (if their clocks drift some) or every three hours if they don't drift much. It keeps them all withing a second quite nicely. That seems close enough for what we do, and of course we use ntpdate at boot time to set the clock. -- ===================================================================== Sydney S. Weinstein, CDP, CCP Elm Coordinator Datacomp Systems, Inc. Voice: (215) 947-9900 syd@DSI.COM or dsinc!syd FAX: (215) 938-0235
Mills@udel.edu (03/09/91)
Anders, Well, if that fraction holds throughout the Internet, there should be some 24,000 chimer and chimee NTP hosts. I wouldn't be surprised, since the level of the assault on the fuzzball primary servers has easily doubled over six months ago. Dave
louie@SAYSHELL.UMD.EDU ("Louis A. Mamakos") (03/09/91)
The NeXT ntpd implementation is derived from the ntp 3.4 version that we wrote here at the University of Maryland. I also have some changes that they made to interface with the Netinfo system they use. It seems confined to the part of ntpd that reads and parses the configuration file. Otherwise, it seems to be a rather standard version of ntpd. My personal thanks to NeXT for tracking down and killing horrible kernel bugs that made the NeXT 0.8 version of the software behave almost as bad as SunOS does. It seems to keep rather good time. louie
ken@HPSDLZ.SDD.HP.COM (Ken Stone) (03/09/91)
> All of our systems run ntpdate very hour (if their clocks drift some) > or every three hours if they don't drift much. It keeps them all > withing a second quite nicely. That seems close enough for what > we do, and of course we use ntpdate at boot time to set the clock. I ran some tests here and found that an xntpd running as a broadcast client took less umph than running ntpdate or rtime or whatever out of cron. We found that we had large cad program users that could tell us when ntpdate ran out of cron consistantly even with us varying the times whereas a xntpd presented a much lighter and consistant load that no one noticed. This is on medium sized workstations. Just a thought ... -- Ken