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jrronimo

54 karma · joined August 24, 2015

Retro computers and retro video games. Windows guy. Ubiquiti certified.
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jrronimo··on NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power
I'm the Manager of the Computing group at JILA at CU, where utcnist*.colorado.edu used to be housed. Those machines were, for years, consistently the highest bandwidth usage computers on campus.

Unfortunately, the HP cesium clock that backed the utcnist systems failed a few weeks ago, so they're offline. I believe the plan is to decommission those servers anyway - NIST doesn't even list them on the NTP status page anymore, and Judah Levine has retired (though he still comes in frequently). Judah told me in the past that the typical plan in this situation is that you reference a spare HP clock with the clock at NIST, then drive it over to JILA backed by some sort of battery and put it in the rack, then send in the broken one for refurb (~$20k-$40k; new box is closer to $75k). The same is true for the WWVB station, should its clocks fail.

There is fiber that connects NIST to CU (it's part of the BRAN - Boulder Research and Administration Network). Typically that's used when comparing some of the new clocks at JILA (like Jun Ye's strontium clock) to NIST's reference. Fun fact: Some years back the group was noticing loss due to the fiber couplers in various closets between JILA & NIST... so they went to the closets and directly spliced the fibers to each other. It's now one single strand of fiber between JILA & NIST Boulder.

That fiber wasn't connected to the clock that backed utcnist though. utcnist's clock was a commercial cesium clock box from HP that was also fed by GPS. This setup was not particularly sensitive to people being in the room or anything.

Another fun fact: utcnist3 was an FPGA developed in-house to respond to NTP traffic. Super cool project, though I didn't have anything to do with it, haha.

jrronimo··on Ask HN: Best Small Company (~25-50 Users) Router Setup?
Are you looking to just bridge people wireless -> wired connections or do you want something akin to a home router setup that handles DHCP and firewalling?

Either way, having too many devices connected to the same (single) radio can make it hard for any traffic to get through. A brief overview on airtime is here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wi-fi-performance,2985-1... -- in your situation, a minimum of two access points would be a good idea.

If you're looking for just access points, then I'd recommend a 3-pack of Ubiquiti UAP-Pros, spaced out relatively evenly around your work environment: http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Networks-UniFi-Enterprise-Sys... -- configuring them requires free server software, but once they're up and running, the server software can be shut down and the devices can run independently.

I recommend these as a Ubiquiti enterprise certified person with a current deployment of 30 UAP-ACs, on my way up to about 80 devices in total. I have one auditorium room with about 200 seats that, so far, 3 access points seem to cover without trouble.