Do you have a local NTP server for your devices?

Linux Discussion
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I posted this months ago, zero replies, must not be much traffic in uncategorized, so I moved it.

The Linux powered NTP pool has 4,400 nodes, worldwide, and they ars still asking for more volunteers for extra capacity and load balancing.

Have you ever given this any thought? My smart tv doesn’t work (no services load properly, can’t log in) without enabling that TV brand specific time domain. I think that’s just wasteful. My android device could have, probably was, calling out to FIVE different NTP servers. I could see two, or maybe three, but five is just excessive. So I just disabled time syncing on that device, and match it with other clocks.

Windows uses a different time server than Linux, I have no idea what Macs or apple devices use, and your modem also has time syncing built in as well, plus your router, and your virtual machines.

To reduce load on the NTP servers, disable time syncing in all virtual machines, they are getting time from the host system (at least by default I know virtualbox does) and then set up a local time server inside a router system like PFsense or OPNsense.

Then figure out how to redirect all ntp calls, to the local box, and just imagine how much less electricity would be used or required by all thw worlds time servers. If you are thinking having yet another pc running just to serve time (if your current router isn’t that customizable) is never going to make up for the extra power saved in outbound ntp calls, use a sbc, or try installing openwrt onto a wifi router.

The idea is to use the components you already have, like a wifi router, instead of adding another pc, so that you aren’t using more power than what you’ll be able to save.

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I read it the last time you posted this – word for word. It’s an interesting idea but one that I thought was directed to someone other than the average linux user. There is a more localized version of NTP called Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) that I think is used in LANs.

Have you thought about creating a tutorial on how typical linux users with 3 or half dozen devices can utilize SNTP?

On the flip side of this, perhaps many folks are like I am. I happen to think that in North America, electricity is cheap and could even be produced cheaper and cleaner it if weren’t for government mandated intervention policies. I wonder if the personal TIME spend on installation, configuration, and troubleshooting of such a local system would be worth it seeing that I currently pay about 12 cents for a kilowatt hour of electricity.

Do you have any figures on what the return on my investment would be?

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It’s not about saving money. I don’t think the word is in my post at all. There is no monetary return on the time investment for a local NTP server.

The entire idea is to save external energy use caused by how our devices are configured. A single click can load a webserver. It may not be energy that you are paying for, but by having your pc connected online, it’s very easy to use that electricity.

PFsense and similar could be used as the router, setup the NTP server, which is just asking a website on udp port 123. Then somehow there is software that sends time data back to all lan devices.

You must redirect all other NTP servers your devices might use, to make this effective. You can just sync one device every couple weeks, and sync all lan devices 12 times a day if you wanted to, with no extra power used from non-local equipment.