Just got my IoTaWatt today, and I didn’t see / haven’t yet found a way to configure the time servers the device uses. I poked through most of the configuration, and even searched in the docs.
Not a big deal, just a nice feature to have.
Being a gadget / tech person, I have a home-built RaspberryPi NTP server and would like to use that, rather that have the IoTaWatt itself reach out to the Intertubes for its time.
Had a lot of problems with time servers globally until switched over to google time servers. All of the problems disappeared. They also have away of smoothing over leap=seconds that others don’t do.
If you have local DNS running on your router, it’s possible to modify dnsmasq.conf.
address=/time.google.com/time1.google.com/time2.google.com/time3.google.com/time4.google.com/192.168.1.11
where 192.168.1.11 would be the IP address of your RPi running an NTP server.
That is, in fact, what I did.
However, it is good to know that @overeasy has experienced problems with leap seconds. I can switch over to the google time servers for that day and take advantage of their leap smearing to avoid the leap second problem, and then switch back.
I’m curious to know what other time issues @overeasy ran into, but, this is so far in the weeds, I’m sure there are more important things to worry about / improve.
Leap seconds were not an issue, I was just sayin. The issue with the global ntp.org was that they were volunteer servers and not always reliable around the globe (IoTaWatt is in 50+ countries). Also, doesn’t seem to be an organization behind it anymore. I tried several times to register as an institutional user but got no response. Time servers are such a trivial part of the google presence that it just works.