Computers worldwide use the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to synchronize their times with internet standard reference clocks via a hierarchy of NTP servers. The primary servers are at stratum 1, and they are connected directly to various national time services at stratum 0 via satellite, radio, or even modems over phone lines. The time service at stratum 0 may be an atomic clock, a radio receiver tuned to the signals broadcast by an atomic clock, or a GPS receiver using the highly accurate clock signals broadcast by GPS satellites.
To prevent time requests from time servers lower in the hierarchy (i.e., with a higher stratum number) from overwhelming the primary reference servers, there are several thousand public NTP stratum 2 servers that are open and available for anyone to use. Many organizations with large numbers of hosts that need an NTP server will set up their own time servers so that only one local host accesses the stratum 2 time servers, then they configure the remaining network hosts to use the local time server which, in my case, is a stratum 3 server. The original NTP daemon, ntpd, has been joined by a newer one, chronyd.
Both keep the local host’s time synchronized with the time server. Both services are available, and I have seen nothing to indicate that this will change anytime soon.
Source: opensource.com