Joining the NTP Pool

This morning I setup a NTP server and added it to the UK pool. While as the graph shows it has been rising…

There are still relatively few IPv6 ntp servers as below shows.

To make a contribution to the web I decided to join the the ntp pool. The NTP pool project is managed by Ask Bjørn Hansen.

Joining the NTP Pool is simple:

apt-get install ntp

If your running a firewall make sure you allow port 123 over UDP in both directions.

Now edit the ntp.conf file:

nano /etc/ntp.conf

Remove the pool servers and replace with a number of NTP servers. For example:

server ntp2d.mcc.ac.uk iburst
server ntppub.le.ac.uk iburst

Save the ntp.conf file and restart ntp:

sudo service ntp restart

Last but not least add your server to the pool by heading over to this website https://manage.ntppool.org/manage/servers

You should also make sure you understand the configuration recommendation here. While my distribution met these configuration requirements already, distributions do vary: http://www.pool.ntp.org/join/configuration.html