Hi folks,
SHORT VERSION:
someone knows anything about using DVB-T as a clocksource for NTPd?
SOME BACKGROUND:
currently I am syncing my (OpenBSD)router's clock over NTP and this is
then the NTP server for the whole network. Of course this has a little
disadvantage that router being EdgeRouterLite loosing time on load,
however this does not happen often, so this is not a big problem as
long as I keep syncing the clock to some outside reliable clocksource.
EdgeRouterLites also do not have any hardware clock too, so I need to
sync clock anyway. The question is only to what.
Now as you see on my signature in the bottom I am in Slovakia and I
have here a DSL connection (Orange/FranceTelecom) which does IPv6 by
using DS_Lite. So I have to set up a tunnel in order to get IPv4
connectivity. But that takes some time at bootup and also the tunnel
adds latency, to cut the story short, I do not like doing NTP over IPv4.
Now here in Slovakia and also in CzechRepublic we do not have IPv6
capable NTP pool servers around, the nearest ones I found are located
in Austria, which is totally fine, because that may be even
geographically shorter path than somewhere else in SVK or CZ.
But those austrian NTP servers that can do IPv6 are not very reliable.
Here my current ntpctl -s all (OpenBSD):
6/7 peers valid, constraint offset 48s, clock unsynced, clock offset is
6997.501ms
peer
wt tl st next poll offset delay jitter
2001:628:21f0:80::80:160
1 10 21s 34s 1.004ms22.677ms 0.562ms
2001:628:21f0:80::80:35
1 10 21s 30s 1.035ms22.014ms 5.184ms
2001:938:1337:d1::53:c
1 10 4 12s 32s 0.393ms26.575ms 8.611ms
2001:938:1337:a2::53:c
1 10 3 17s 32s-1.066ms28.812ms21.493ms
2001:938:1337:d3::53:c
1 2 - 272s 300s peer not valid
2001:62a:4:311::123
1 10 1 30s 32s 2.353ms22.303ms 2.170ms
2001:628:2030:dcf1::123
1 10 1 21s 34s-1.854ms28.456ms20.760ms
OK, that offset by 7 seconds does not happen normally, no idea why it
happened now, whatever. Network servers look fine though.
Now, I do not like all this, that's why I ordered
vk-172 gmouse g-mouse USB GPS/GLONASS USB over amazon
and hope I can use that in combination with some Raspberry PI as NTPd
clocksource, as I saw some ppl doing.
But that is only one clocksource, multiple would be preferrable.
I have some DVB-T adapter lying around that can also be used as a
clocksource, since those old DVB-T adapters are not good for TV anymore
since ppl are sending DVB-T2, there is still for the forseeable
future enough frequencies that will be still old DVB-T and those have
time signal in them that can be used SOMEHOW.
Of course there is always the fallback to having a cronjob run like
every hour and having it do "dvbdate --force --set". But that is not as
good as syncing NTPd directly to DVB-Ts signal.
I have no idea how this could be implemented, but I saw some examples
of how this GPS thing works on:
https://esp8266hints.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/a-neat-toy-but-not-an-esp/
That's where I got the idea from to get my own GPS dongle.
It looks like it opens some kind of virtual console where it puts the
current date in and NTPd reads it from there. So I suppose one would
need to open up some kind of socket and sending there DVB-T timestamps.
No idea. What do you ppl say?
--
Lars Schotte
Mudroňova 13
92101 Piešťany
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