My impression is that NTP Classic from ntp.org will die. Maybe not immediately but the days will be counted. To deal with NTPsec can’t be a wrong decision. And to have the tools on the private MacBook delivered by NTPsec is a nice feature. I describe here how to compile NTPsec on OS X.

My environment:

  • macOS Sierra 10.12.4
  • Homebrew from https://brew.sh/

Which formulas from brew are actually needed I can’t say exactly. I installed “brew” with a lot of packages - sorry formulas - long time before. The recommended packages you can find in file “INSTALL” once you download the source tree. Definitely you need

  • python
  • openssl

And here are the necessary steps:

git clone https://github.com/ntpsec/ntpsec.git
cd ntpsec
export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib"
export CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include"
./waf configure
./waf build
./waf install

That’s it. Enjoy.

How to run ntpd on macOS is a different story.

Some important external links: