So my home network is... complex. I'd always relied on internet NTP as good enough. Until one day we had a big storm that took down the power. The outage lasted long enough that my UPS's were going to run out of juice, so I started my shutdown procedure.
When the power came back on, the cable modem didn't establish block sync. Called my ISP and services were still down due to the storm. I started bringing everything back up, as I have plenty of services on the internal network. Only alot of stuff wasn't working. Come to find out that I had alot of gear that wasn't saving the date/time properly and had reverted to default. Normally this isn't an issue, but with no internet service, many nodes couldn't restore proper time. Everything that required time to be relatively in sync with the Active Directory domain controller was effectively busted, authentication being prime among them. I ended up having to log into every single node with local admin credentials and set the clocks manually.
This taught me the folly of relying only on Internet NTP. So I was looking for something that would function as a stratum 1 NTP server for my local network, had no reliance on the Internet, and didn't break the bank. Searches found plenty of used enterprise level NTP servers (forget about new), but they were all very pricey.
Then I ran across the CSS Time Machines offerings. They seemed to fit the bill perfectly. While $300 for the TM1000A isn't exactly cheap, for what it does, it's actually very cheap.
The install was simple. It's setup in a room where there is a window, but in order to get the device on the network, it had to be placed on the opposite side of the room from the window (because I was not going to leave a network cable running across the room). This was no issue. The antenna's receiver portion is magnetic, it stuck to the top of the rack that I had the unit mounted in, and locked onto it's satellites within 2 minutes of applying power.
After reconfiguring the IP address for something appropriate to my network, I began pointing all of my NTP clients to it. They all picked it up and synced to it in under a minute (I do use iburst). So now I have reliable local NTP independent of the internet at a very reasonable cost.
I've seen other reviews say that it's not a good idea to point clients at it directly, but let a few servers sync off of it and then have the rest of your network sync off of the other servers. The product manual states very clearly that the unit can service 135ish synchronizations per second. If your number of NTP clients are smaller than this, then there's not going to be an issue. In a Windows domain setting, your domain connected clients are probably going to be syncing against a domain controller anyway, so you only need point the domain controller at the TM1000A. If your environment is at a scale that you require more than 135 syncs per second, you should probably be looking at something like a Symmetricon anyway.
As a network engineer by profession, I do have a few nitpicks, which is the reason I didn't give it a 5 star rating.
The default IP configuration may not jive with the way your network is setup. By default, the device is configured with the IP of 192.168.1.15 with a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 and a default gateway of 192.168.0.1. I would much rather it pickup it's initial IP configuration via DHCP and then fall back to the 192.168.1.15 setup as a default if it doesn't get a DHCP lease. It's a minor nitpick, but having to either reconfigure portions of my network to support that IP space, or having to connect a host directly to the unit and reconfigure it's IP is something I didn't like. I understand CSS's reasons for what they did, as NTP servers *should* have static IP's, but I'd rather they default to DHCP in order to make it easier to get to the management page in order to set a static IP, making the entire process alot more plug and play.
The other nitpicks are just management issues. Web interface is HTTP only and is only protected by a password. If you're going to use this in a setting with multiple users (ie, small enterprise or business), make sure you do not locate it on a VLAN where users without the proper access are able to sniff it's traffic. While I understand that deploying a full AAA solution would have likely added to the cost of the unit, I would have appreciated at least the ability to define a username and password and the ability to use HTTPS, even if it was just with a self-signed certificate. The lack of device security would make these non-starters to deploy at some of the companies I do business with due to their network security policies.
And the final nitpick is no ability to monitor with standard tools. Not even SNMP. If you want to monitor these, you're going to have to do some coding/scripting, or find someone who already has and was nice enough to make them public. For me, this is not such a big deal, as most of the clients have tools that will show you their NTP status and whether they're synced to the unit, but having a lack of visibility due to no support for common network monitoring methods is something I knock every network device for.
All in all, this little box is great. It's about as turnkey as you can get for a Strat 1 NTP server for your LAN, and it's about as reasonable a price as you could expect for a turnkey solution. I would not hesitate to recommend these for deployment, assuming network security policy doesn't rule it out, and I will probably pick up another one at some point for my own network because I like redundancy.
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