[time-nuts] Sun Blade 100 as GPS-controlled NTP server

Matthew Smith matt at smiffytech.com
Sun Mar 16 00:26:21 EDT 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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