Introduction
While working in one of the datacenters at my organization I come across many interesting pieces of enterprise hardware. Most of which I couldn’t dream of running at home due to noise and of course, I don’t own a power station. But one server in particular that caught my interest was a Netclock 9483 managed by one of our vendors. Immediately it drew my attention. I knew that one day I had to have one of my own. Their is no practical reason for this other that I genuinely like the look that it gives my rack. Plus what who doesn’t want to brag about having your own private sub ~100ns time source.
Acquiring Hardware
Sadly, we wont be decommissioning our Netclock anytime soon, so I had to find the next best source, eBay! I kept my eye out for a few weeks, my goal was to get one is good operable condition with a OCXO for around $250USD or less. At the time of searching most fully functional 9483s were listed for $800USD+. I didn’t want to spend this much so I kept researching and came across a listing for $400, only issue was the LED display was noted as faulty, otherwise it would boot and was in physically good condition. Because of the issues I sent a lowball offer of $200. The seller immediately accepted. In hindsight it makes me wish I sent an even lower offer but alas I did not. The seller was Canadian and the shipping went smooth. FedEx hung up the tracking for a while due to weather but eventually it arrived with no damage.
First Boot!
Now came the time for first boot. Before attempting to boot I did a look over the hardware to check for any obvious issues or missing components. Everything looked pretty normal to me although I noticed a suspicious Compact Flash slot that would later come to haunt me. Once satisfied I plugged it in, flipped the switch and crossed my fingers. Immediately the fan bearing started grinding, thankfully not a big deal. After about 5s the front LED panel powered up. The display was blank but the backlight turned on. Then the time display on the side powered up and began to count up. At this point I was hopeful that the device was “on” and that the LED display was blank like the eBay listing said.
Troubleshooting
Once I booted it up I let the clock idle for a few minutes and nothing changed. I figured that since the screen indeed was blank I should move onto accessing the web GUI. Needless to say that came with its own issues. I plugged it into my 3560X switch and waited a bit for the activity lights to go green. Once green I connected to my Omada GUI and checked DHCP for what reservation it picked up. This turned up nothing, I couldn’t find the IP. I tried checked the IP table on the switch to no avail as well. At this point I became very skeptical of the CF slot being empty but figured I would give it one more go to get the IP. I plugged it into my spare laptop while running a PCAP to see if I could find a ARP advertisement to get the IP…nothing, time to start Googling!
This is where I ran across a old forum post from someone in a similar situation in 2021. (Located here) They were having similar issues although they bricked the BIOS. Not sure if they were ever able to get it fixed but the information they shared was enough to convince me the CF slot indeed was where a OS would be installed. This makes sense in hindsight since these devices are marketed to law enforcement. They must have removed it before recycling the device. Now I had to source a useable image to flash. Luckily the stars aligned and someone posted multiple different images for a 9483 on archive.org! With this .img I was able to use rufus and flash the image easily.
Now for the moment of truth…Its alive!
I was ecstatic, the LED display was functional! The eBay listing was incorrect and the screen was functional as you can see above. The only fault is the lower dot on the colon for the 9 digit display but I will save that for a future project. Once plugged in it pulled an IP and displayed it on the front panel. With this I was able to access the GUI and login with the default credentials. Whew after some of the other reading I was doing I was worried that I was going to finally get the .img to work just to get smacked with a license prompt and be out of luck.
GPS Configuration
Now that I was able to get in the GUI and everything looked to be functional it was finally time to get it setup and running. This overall was pretty simple. My goal is to setup the antenna and successfully pull GPS time and have NTP backup references if needed. For my antenna I didn’t get anything fancy, I went with a Bingfu SMA antenna from Amazon and a type N to SMA adapter. I’m keeping an eye out for a Spectracom 8230 to popup on eBay to complete the ‘official’ setup but for now a Bingfu works.
Parts List:
Once installed the Netclock automatically acknowledged the antenna and began a satellite survey. This took a few tries to get right, but once I got the antenna placed in a good spot where it would get signal it took about 3hours. After the survey it automatically pulled time and started ticking. The time was a bit off in the beginning, but after adjusting a few settings I got it to keep consistent time. Currently it is able to keep an estimated time error(ETE) of 10ns < ETE <= 100ns. I can now say that I maintain my own stratum 1 time server, time to check that off the bucket list.
GPS Disciplined Desktop Clock?
I hope in the future to use this for more than just a rack decoration and simple time keeping. Currently I only have 2 clients referencing it. (My Desktop and my home server) Since it has a 1PPS output I want to try and build a clock that will run using that signal to maintain time. So instead of running a 555 clock circuit or something similar it will work off the raw PPS signal for when to increment the time. Is this possible, I have no idea but it sounds like a fun project!
Hope you found this interesting, thanks for reading!