GPS Giveaway: Supporting the NTP Pool Project

Meinberg Radio Clocks of Bad Pyrmont, Germany donated professional GPS time synchronization equipment to the NTP Pool Project. The GPS170PCI cards and the LANTIME M300/GPS will be given to private persons or organizations who are willing to add their NTP server to the NTP pool (or already did so).

The NTP Pool Project provides a possibility to all Internet users to synchronize their PC clock with one of the highly accurate time servers of the NTP pool.

For most private users it would be too expensive to buy dedicated time synchronization equipment just to make sure that their computer system clock is correct. Since accuracy down to the millisecond level is not crucial to them and not many private PCs will face severe problems when their system time is wrong for a while, the costs of professional equipment would by far outweight the benefits. Fortunately the NTP Pool Project provides a very good solution to most private PC users by using their already existing Internet connection to synchronize their computer time with one of the NTP servers in the pool.

The NTP Pool uses a sophisticated mechanism to distribute the millions of clients equally to the available NTP servers in the NTP Pool. The end user simply configures his time synchronization software to use one of the virtual hostnames like "us.pool.ntp.org" or simply "pool.ntp.org" and the network of domain name servers of the pool will resolve these names into a list of IP addresses of pool servers. By changing the selected group of servers for each of the NTP pool hostname aliases, the clients are disbtributed to the pool servers in a reliable and effective way.

Currently the NTP Pool consists of nearly 1000 NTP servers, Ask Bjørn Hansen (NTP Pool Project maintainer) and Meinberg hope to motivate more people to joing the pool with this GPS GIveaway action.P> More information about the GPS Giveaway Aktion can be found on the GPS Time Equipment Giveaway page of the NTP Pool Project.