I would welcome an IOT (Internet of Things) WiFi standard that enabled my microwave oven, kitchen cooktop range/oven, washer/dryer, dishwasher, wall and desk clock(s), security alarm panel, etc... to all be able to get an IP address and use NTP on a "Time Network" subnet of my WiFi without any setup from me. Seems easy enough with DHCP.. It just needs a time-net standard so all the devices try to do the same thing.
I don't want all those things on the net so my house can be totally pwned, but on a firewalled time-net, sure !
This already exists (and did so long before the "internet of things" buzzword). It is called pool.ntp.com, which uses DNS to automatically give you a NTP server geographically close by. Any network enabled device is free to use that, and let your home router provide the firewall. If you really want to avoid having your devices talk over the internet even behind a firewall, you can use the DHCP "ntp-servers" option to point them at a local time server (which can in turn talk to the pool or be have a GPS receiver). Corporate networks and thin client systems have been doing this for decades, and the only thing that really needs to happen for it to work is the individual devices to include an NTP client with a default setup.
Of course I know that the pool NTP servers exist. I guess I wasn't clear about that, but I was talking about NTP and DHCP.
You misread me and reposted what I already implied.. I already said this could be done with NTP and DCHP options, and even implied a local NTP server. Hell, I run one here at my home lab
What I said didn't exist yet was a
standardized way to do this locally, and on a "TIME ONLY NETWORK".. i.e. I want my devices to get time, I don't want them on the main Internet to do this, and I don't want to have to program each one with the WIFI parameters needed to do this. Just as you said, a preconfiged NTP setup. I want a standard WIFI time server, I.E. SSID 'time', that my router can even provide with an extra radio, or hook to the neighbors open "time" network.. but this network is NTP only, no other services run on it. This way, devices that need time can embed a wifi module and an NTP client and bind to the "time" SSID, do DHCP to get an IP address and then get the time. The standardization is in the availability of the "time" SSID, or not having that, a new DHCP option that points to a time SSID (I don't mean the time server host option). Devices that need time can use self-assigned link-local addresses in the range 169.254.0.0/16. They should expect to find a time server there, so wifi routers should provide one, or a GPS receiver could too. This is the type of standardizaton I was referring to.
However, I see this is all academic now. There is a usefulness to having these same devices that need time to also provide a web server to control / monitor them. So I realize it just makes more sense now to continue to firewall the home network and just allow the devices to get network time from the NTP pool then, and provide HTTP servers to the home occupants.
What's needed now, then, is a standard interface for home appliances like SCPI is for instruments, but that's off topic here and I've said enough already