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Comment by boricj | Hacker News Reader

> I designed this clock years ago, with the intention to incorporate every feature request I ever received for the previous precision clock.

My first thought after reading this statement was to add one Ethernet port to run a NTP server and have PoE capability. Completely overkill for the intended purpose, but I can't help but giggle at the thought of hanging this on a wall in a datacenter and have the clock also provide time-keeping for it.

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Using 0.56” segment displays would probably let you reduce the horizontal size to below what would fit in a 1U rack mount. It would look sick at the top of the rack in my living room.

You've got a rack in your living room? Sick! (in both meanings)

NTP will typically have about 10ms error which would be visible on this display. So for more authentic giggles PTP is recommended. With compatible switches to compensate for queuing delays and cable length. And if your provider doesn't give you a good time, put your own GPS-backed network clock on the roof. For science.

That would actually be really useful though: being able to see at a glance what the network time should be would be incredibly useful.

There's other types of environments where you isolated users like SCIFs or really anything airgapped.

Hell: that would convince me to buy one that for my house.

No GPS in SCIFs. Agree ntp would be great. Also I’d prefer a way to manually switch between a fixed set of time zone, or even just showing UTC always as an option.

How do SCIFs do time? Do they use optoisolated network connections and then do time sync over that? (SIPRnet, is it?)

The US Navy maintains NTP servers on a variety of networks, the public internet and SIPR included.

https://www.cnmoc.usff.navy.mil/Our-Commands/United-States-N...

If you have a special project need, you might be able to get one-way IRIG time signal on fiber with guard boxes at both ends. There's really no technical reason why you couldn't do analog GPS baseband over fiber, but you do need approved equipment at both ends for policy reasons. (certified for no backflow)

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