The NTP Pool Needs More Servers — Yours, If Available 160
Do you have a static IP or two? If so, you might be able to spread some Internet infrastructure well-being with very little effort. An anonymous reader writes "The NTP Pool project is turning 10 soon, and needs more servers to continue serving reasonably accurate time to anyone in the world."
No Gov. help? (Score:1, Interesting)
This seems like something that almost every country and government in the world, could thrown down a couple hundred dollars a year for. 3rd world, and war-torn countries need not apply for obvious reasons....
In the US, is NIST involved in this at all? If not, why not? Just seems like something that they'd be all over.
Why not use EC2? (Score:4, Interesting)
$25 Raspberry Pi + $27 GPS reciever? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some quick searching shows one can get a USB GPS receiver for $27 [amazon.com] and the comments say it works with linux/gpsd, showing up as /dev/ttyUSB0.
Somebody could make a simple OS image that would narrow the scope of the problem to the availability of ~$60 and an available public IP address.
Re:What is NTP? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the same sense that HTTP could be "Highly Technical TARDIS Protocol", yes. But anyone who needs HTTP expanded is a n00b (no offense, we were all n00bs once);it's a universally-used protocol.
NTP is also a universally-used protocol. Every server (every properly-managed server, at least) uses it, and many if not most PCs use it.
OTOH, the number one meaning for "LSEQ" seems to be "Leeds Sleep Evaluation Questionnaire", according to the duck. Not universal.
If you not only don't know what NTP is, but after looking it up think it's mysterious to the average /.er, you deserve a little teasing. ;-)
Too many idiots are pissing in the pool. (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to have a computer in the pool, but removed it due to disgust with the NTP abusers out there. When I looked at the logs, I would see that the vast majority of incoming traffic was from a relatively small handful of IP address. For normal well behaved users, you would see them hit you every 64 seconds and over a period of a few hours slowly back off until they do a query only once every 1024 seconds. Reasonable and well behaved. Even a relatively low bandwidth DSL line could handle a lot of users like that.
Unfortunately, not all the users are reasonable and well behaved. There were a few addresses that were hitting me with a query per second. And you can't blacklist these anti-social idiots because if you do, they're still consuming inbound bandwidth. After a period of time where 1% of the users were consuming 99% of my donated resources, I left the pool out of disgust. Was still getting hits from the idiot users a year later.
To make their idiocy even more evident, the SHORTEST interval that NTPD will hit a server is once per 16 seconds. So those once a second idiots were using software that itself was written by idiots.
Would I donate to the pool again? Nope. Not at long as there are invalid NTP clients that hit that often. If I could be assured that the idiots are gone, then I'd donate. Until then, I don't need the headaches.
Re:$25 Raspberry Pi + $27 GPS reciever? (Score:4, Interesting)
An USB GPS means no Pulse Per Second (actually 1000ms). The PPS fires an interrupt on the serial port, which should result in an interrupt every 1000ms accurate within 100us.
The lack of PPS will result in a ntpd with lots of jitter, my experience is about +/- 150ms but this depends heavily on actual USB usage and the GPS device itself. This is unsuitable for a low stratum ntpserver IMHO, so don't use it as the only timesource if you want to participate in the pool unless you advertise it as some high stratum source (I would guess 5-10).
Re:Too many idiots are pissing in the pool. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got one better -- I actually had a pool user call my ISP and get me disconnected (temporarily) because I was "hacking" them on UDP port 123.
Re:In the mean time.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've always wondered about the defaults to have every RH/Debian/Suse/Ubuntu/etc. box talk directly to the pool. I know that for years, the pool has been considered fully sufficient to meet these needs, but it just always struck me as more efficient for an organization to run its own NTP server--one machine talking to the pool--and have other machines in the organization talk to that, rather than having all the machines in the organization talk to the pool.
They actually talk to a "vendor" subdomain of the pool [ntp.org]: 0.rhel.pool.ntp.org, 1.rhel.pool.ntp.org, 2.rhel.pool.ntp.org, etc.
They provide vendor-specific subdomains and encourage vendors to provide NTP servers to the pool. Thus, if there's some abuse or misconfiguration that results in excessive traffic they can change the vendor-specific subdomain to prevent that traffic from flooding NTP servers without inconveniencing clients that use the general pool.
Anyway, yes: it's better for an organization to have one or two local time servers communicate with the pool (or other sources of time) and then provide time service to the local network. Still, talking to the pool is a reasonably sane "general purpose" default.
Re:Do you need a clock? (Score:5, Interesting)
Until somebody hard codes your server into their commercial firmware and screws up the NTP implementation.
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/