[time-nuts] Sun Blade 100 as GPS-controlled NTP server
Matthew Smith
matt at smiffytech.com
Sun Mar 16 04:26:21 UTC 2008
Hi Folks
I have shelved the idea of building my time server with a single board
PC for the time being - putting together a case, PSU, etc., and doing an
install with no monitor (would have to make an adapter) is just too much
like hard work.
I have a choice of a couple of Ultrasparc boxes that I can use that
aren't doing much at present.
My first choice is my Sun Blade 100 as it is small, quiet, doesn't use
much power and also has enough disc on it to take backups from my main
server. Second choice is based on a sun AXi OEM motherboard. This only
takes SCSI discs (I don't have any large ones floating around) and has
no USB so an external disc for backups might not be easy to implement
unless OpenBSD happens to have support for add-on USB PCI cards.
The potential problem with the Blade is that it has absolutely lousy
timekeeping. If run without NTPD, it will drift minutes out in a day.
I am advised that this is a hardware issue specific to that model. I
believe that there is a patch to compensate for this in Solaris, but
it's seriously bad under Linux.
The question is this - does it matter? If I am running NTPD and feeding
in NMEA+PPS, is the native timekeeping (or lack of) an issue?
Whichever box gets the job, it will be running OpenBSD.
Cheers
M
--
Matthew Smith
Smiffytech - Technology Consulting & Web Application Development
Business: http://www.smiffytech.com/
Personal: http://www.smiffysplace.com/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/smiffy
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