Re: No Escape

[<aah@nofs.navy.mil>]

Gary,
  Not all of the installations will be running Linux.
Those that do and those that are on the internet on a
semipermanent basis will most likely be running some
flavor of NTP (I know ours will; right now it is outside
the firewall and so we have things like NTP turned off).
So I think the policy should be that you use the best
possible time source that you can, whether it be a
manual synch to GPS or WWV or an automated update.
Perhaps an extra fits header entry that indicates the
time source would be helpful?  Something like:
  TIMEBASE= 'Manual GPS'
  TIMEBASE= 'NTP'
  TIMEBASE= 'SNTP'
or somesuch.  I know that ARNE's PC gains about 6 seconds
per night, about the error that I know the shutter open/close
times to, so I reset the clock once/day right now while
the system is outside the firewall.
  Things like satellite internet are painful; they are
expensive, require a telephone line for uplink, and usually
you are not a permanent node.  I think in the future the
cell-phone-based internet will be the logical choice for
remote observatories.
Arne