Tag Archives: DCF77

Monitoring a Meinberg LANTIME NTP Server

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Monitoring a Meinberg LANTIME appliance is much easier than monitoring DIY NTP servers. Why? Because you can use the provided enterprise MIB and load it into your SNMP-based monitoring system. Great. The MIB serves many OIDs such as the firmware version, reference clock state, offset, client requests, and even more specific ones such as “correlation” and “field strength” in case of my phase-modulated DCF77 receiver (which is called “PZF” by Meinberg). And since the LANTIME is built upon Linux, you can use the well-known system and interfaces MIBs as well for basic coverage. Let’s dig into it:

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Monitoring a DCF77 NTP Server

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Now that you’re monitoring the Linux operating system as well as the NTP server basics, it’s interesting to have a look at some more details about the DCF77 receiver. Honestly, there is only one more variable that gives a few details, namely the Clock Status Word and its Event Field. At least you have one more graph in your monitoring system. ;)

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NTP Appliance: Meinberg LANTIME & SyncFire

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In case you’re responsible for an enterprise network or data center you should care about NTP. Refer to “Why should I run own NTP Servers?“. As a hobby technician you might first think about Raspberry Pis with self soldered GPS modules. Well, good idea to play with, but not reliable at all. Way to unstable, hard to update, no alerting, no service agreements, and so on.

Hence you should use a dedicated NTP appliance such as the Meinberg LANTIME NTP Time Servers. I am using a LANTIME M200 with a DCF77 correlation receiver in my lab. With this post I am showing how to set up this NTP server, giving some insights, and listing the advantages of such an appliance compared to a Raspberry Pi or any other DIY server approach. My wish list aka feature requests to this product round things up.

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NTP Server via DCF77 on a Raspberry Pi

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In this tutorial, I will show how to set up a Raspberry Pi with a DCF77 receiver as an NTP server. Since the external radio clock via DCF77 is a stratum 0 source, the NTP server itself is stratum 1. I am showing how to connect the DCF77 module and I am listing all relevant commands as a step by step guide to install the NTP things. With this tutorial, you will be able to operate your own stratum 1 NTP server. Nice DIY project. ;) However, keep in mind that you should only use it on a private playground and not on an enterprise network that should consist of high reliable NTP servers rather than DIY Raspberry Pis. Anyway, let’s go:

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