Blog of activities for pool of time servers at chrony.eu
2026-02-07: How accurate are clocks in consumer devices?
As mentioned previously, our NTP servers achieve an accuracy of around 130 nanoseconds at the system level. But what does this mean for consumer devices connected to the internet? Not much. Typically, clients are within one to ten milliseconds of the time provided by the nearest Stratum 1 NTP server. However, if you synchronise your device with a level two or higher server, this figure could increase by as much as tenfold. This range of precision is to be expected because internet packets can experience high jitter and UDP protocol delivery is not guaranteed. While it is still perfect for daily usage on consumer-grade devices, it is around 5,000–50,000 times less accurate than a Stratum 1 server.
2026-01-17: What about platform error?
We show the estimated server error in one of the performance graphs (for each server separately). After looking at this more closely, we found that this error is mostly caused by a routine that deals with the system clock. The GPS NTP module is much more accurate than the delay caused by the servicing interrupt routine for clock synchronisation. This depends on the platform and is part of the design. For us, it stays at around 127ns to 130ns, and it doesn't change much.
2025-08-15: Upgrade to Debian 13 (trixie).
As our cluster chrony.eu of servers is based on Debian distribution we migrated whole cluster to Debian 13 (trixie). It went without problems in relative short amount of time. We appreciate work of many volunteers on Debian project and many other projects on which Debian is based.
Same as Debian we offer our time services for free for public benefit.
2025-06-12: Upgrade of chrony server.
Today we preformed regular maintenance upgrade of chrony server. We strive to upgrade to each new version as soon as it is available. Main reasons are security related. Sometimes new functionality is available which is handy for easier maintenance or delivers new functionality from user perspective. Latest version of chrony is 4.7 and we just updated whole cluster chrony.eu to this version today.
Picture: Endless maze of software updates...
2024-09-12: Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC)
NASA will coordinate with U.S. government stakeholders, partners, and international standards organizations to establish a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) following a policy directive from the White House in April. The agency’s Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) program is leading efforts on creating a coordinated time, which will enable a future lunar ecosystem that could be scalable to other locations in our solar system.
The lunar time will be determined by a weighted average of atomic clocks at the Moon, similar to how scientists calculate Earth’s globally recognized Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
continue reading : https://www.nasa.gov/.
