Time server problems

[Ballistic]

Hello and Good Day

Having a real tuff time trying to sync time across all devices. I have the time zone correct and
the time server is 0.peplink.pool.ntp.org.I have option 42 enabled on LAN. all devices have that IP in their DNS.
I also have a service forwarding enabled to that IP. I can’t seem to get every device to sync time. Please any ideas or tips will be very much appreciated.

[Ballistic]

So…no suggestions? No help?
I have read through the other posts. I just want to know if my setup is correct. Or can someone point me in the right direction. A link or other.

[jmjones]

I have asked the same question and gotten back about the same result. Neither my windows nor mac clients honor the DHCP option. Ideally, Peplink would implement something similar to their DNS “interceptor” for NTP traffic. That way you aren’t depending on the client OS to change anything.

[Ballistic]

Thank You for the response,and Good Day

I believe that it’s working now. On my MacBook Pro, it’s using time.Apple.com for ntp.
On the Surf soho, it also uses time.Apple.com for ntp.
On the Surf soho, I enabled option 42 and entered LAN IP.
Then Port forwarding on both the modem and Surf soho. Port 123 tcp and udp. Then all devices get the LAN dns and WAN dns.
The time on the Mac and Surf soho are spot on with each other.The other devices are very close. I have checked the Mac time against NIST and it indicates that Mac time is off by -0.088 seconds.
I have monitored all devices yesterday and this morning and overall I am now satisfied that all devices have correct time.

[Rick-DC]

Good work. I’ll mention that the accuracy you are seeing is about as good as you’re going to get from an internet-based time server. You may be able to optimize this by selecting a server which exhibits lower latency and jitter. But what you are seeing is pretty good. Just FWIW.

@Ballistic

Mac time is off by -0.088 seconds

[jmjones]

Congrats on achieving your goal. I am not sure I follow what you did to fix it, but I guess that is OK because I made the incorrect assumption that you were trying to get your lan clients to update time from the internal NTP server using DHCP to propagate that setting to lan clients. I probably thought that because that was/is my goal. I haven’t spent much time on it because time sync isn’t causing me any grief that I know of.

[mldowling]

Hello @jmjones,
Have you seen this previous reply from @sitloongs where he covers the “Service Forwarding” settings for NTP traffic?

Having unit be an NTP time server would be helpful

@mldowling Please check the below 8.1.0 beta3 features improvement using Peplink device (supported models) as NTP server. It’s important that you have to make sure the Peplink device having correct system time in-order the NTP server will work correctly. For device models that support GPS, GPS time can now be use as the source for system time. We have 3 options now for the time sync option. [image] Enabling NTP Server - Make sure you enable the NTP server feature for the device, default N…

This post from @MartinLangmaid has some helpful insights too

How to direct all internal NTP traffic to local server?

I can never remember what features the SOHO has removed from a normal balance, so don’t get your hopes up till you check, however on a Balance router you can go to Network > Misc.Settings | Service Forwarding and add a custom forwarding service for NTP that would redirect all NTP requests (to wherever you want). [image]

You do not need to declare the DHCP option 42 (time server option) with this setup.

Where possible, we always use the GPS antenna as primary for time reference; the secondary comes from a local NTP approved server or the local pool at ntp.org (find your local, i.e. au.pool.ntp.org)
Happy to Help,
Marcus

[Ballistic]

Thank You All for engaging in this thread. Best to You All.