Lots of high-quality Stratum 1 timeservers make for a robust Internet. Setting one up can be fun, easy, and inexpensive. Now we give you step-by-step instructions on how to build one around a Raspberry Pi hackerboard and a GPS daughterboard, and some helper scripts to automate most of the tedious parts.

Voila: the Stratum-1-Microserver HOWTO.

This is exactly the same recipe the NTPsec project uses to set up its own test nodes, so we maintain it with care. I’ll do a post about our test farm and how we use it some time in the near future.

And now a shout out to Richard Laager, who rescued this HOWTO.

Raspbian Linux has been evolving very fast and the developers have not always been as careful as they should be about documenting incompatible changes; as a result, I spent most of October 2016 believing that this ship had sunk. And contemplating watching my Pis gradually become unusable as NTPsec test machines; this annoyed me considerably.

Richard supplied the missing magic. We devoutly hope that Raspbian will be a bit less of a moving target in the future.