| I don't see any possibility for problems, as long as you just do what has sense to do. https://developers.google.com/time/ "We recommend that you don’t configure Google Public NTP together with non-leap-smearing NTP servers." If you point your NTP clients to time1.google.com to time4.google.com then don't point them to anything else. That's all. If you use Google's time servers you are using them either to be fully in sync with Google or because you like the time-smearing feature. In both cases, just use them, don't mix. Think it as a non-standard-service which is for convenience API compatible with the "standard" NTP. As magicalist pointed, there are already other smearing algorithms online: https://developers.google.com/time/smear#othersmears and Google plans to switch to the new algorithm soon. If all those who need smear standardize around one algorithm, it's going to be even better: there will be one more standard, with the new name, but then it will be even more obvious to everybody what's going on. Obviously both approaches are needed, depending on the usage scenario. |