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From: bdale@COL.HP.COM (Bdale Garbee)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.time.ntp
Subject: Re: How widely deployed is NTP?
Message-ID: <9103072347.AA05288@hpcsbg.col.hp.com>
Date: 7 Mar 91 23:47:55 GMT
References: <9103072309.AA19633@hpsdlz.sdd.hp.com>
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> 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