[mcpherrinm]

You can look at who the "Stratum 2" servers are, in the NTP.org pool and otherwise. Those are servers who sync from Stratum 1, like NIST.

Anyone can join the NTP.org pool so it's hard to make blanket statements about it. I believe there's some monitoring of servers in the pool but I don't know the details.

For example, Ubuntu systems point to their Stratum 2 timeservers by default, and I'd have to imagine that NIST is probably one of their upstreams.

An NTP server usually has multiple upstream sources and can steer its clock to minimize the error across multiple servers, as well as detecting misbehaving servers and reject them ("Falseticker"). Different NTP server implementations might do this a bit differently.

[neonnomad]

I've been running servers for the pool for years. They are checked regularly for accuracy/uptime or it's score goes down in the pool and eventually gets removed. I sync from 5 stratum 1 servers and use chrony these days.

Facebook had a really interesting engineering blog about building their own timeservers: https://engineering.fb.com/2020/03/18/production-engineering...

Really well written for anyone who is interested.