[time-nuts] can of worms: time-of-day in a community radio station

[J.R.]

Eric,

As many others have mentioned, Meinberg has an excellent Windows port
of NTPD that replaces the (horrible) default SNTP client. Linux & Mac
should both have the standard NTPD distributions available.

Since you mentioned internet outages (without mentioning frequency or
duration), adding in your own local GPS based NTP server seems like a
no-brainier. I'm sure you could find a place to mount a GPS antenna
seeing as how it is a radio station, and there are countless
inexpensive GPS modules to choose from that you could build your own
NTP appliance, or connect to one (or more) of your existing servers
and have them as some Stratum-1 time sources for the rest of each
facility. As funding permits, you could upgrade to nicer GPSDO's for
holdover.

I would recommend having your "servers" at each location be the ones
connected to GPS (if you decide to implement), and / or external NTP
servers. Then each desktop / laptop / tablet / whatever all sync to
your local servers (rather than have every device go out on the
internet for time).

In reference to using the NTP Pool, someone mentioned they don't trust
them and the possibility of a "rogue" server. The NTP Pool has a
monitor that is constantly querying every server in the pool, if the
time drifts too far it is removed from the DNS rotation. Also, none of
the servers in the pool should be using leap-smearing (a requirement
you mentioned).

Having 5-7 servers in your NTP configuration allows for one or two
"falsetickers" to be rejected and still have enough good time sources
to keep things humming along.

While there are some public lists of S1 & S2 servers, it can take a
little experimenting to find which ones really work best for each of
your locations. Cloudflare recently launched a public time service,
you can read more about it here: https://www.cloudflare.com/time/  and
I've also found that Apple ( time.apple.com ) also utilizes their CDN
network for delivering the closest NTP servers. From what I have read,
neither of those services use leap-smearing either.  Finally, your ISP
too probably has their own NTP servers too that you may or may not
know about.

Jason