Home - BYO-NTP/recipes GitHub Wiki

Welcome to the BYO-NTP wiki!

BYO-NTP is a resource for builders and aspiring builders of Network Time Protocol servers.

This site has only some recipes, the full catalog is at the BYO-NTP search tool.

Build pages should have a link to a Discussion page about that page. Please add any that are missing.

The installer scripts are in the tools repo.

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Why?

In April of 2025, I was chatting with a fellow network EngiNerd about NTP servers for his data center. I've run NTP servers for decades, in various environments (home labs, data centers, snowflake servers, etc) and I've always just picked a few good stratum 2 or 3 hosts and carried on. I wondered, just how hard would it be to hook up a couple GPS devices to existing servers and let them be better time servers as well?

Everyone that runs a Stratum 1 NTP server is giggling right now, because they know how deep the rabbit hole goes. Many of them have forgotten more about NTP than I know.

This site is written from the fresh-eyed perspective of someone leaving the shallow end of the pool and diving into the deep end of NTP time.

I had an abundance of curiosity and time. Add to that a Pi 4, a Pi 5, 2 micro servers, and 2 server-grade servers (older SAS era). I dipped a toe in the water and bought a VK-162 USB GPS mouse.