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NTP Pool Project Reaches 500 Servers

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the about-time dept.

flok writes "Finally after 3 years the NTP Pool project has reached 500 servers! The NTP pool project tries to be an accurate and free time-source to every internet-connected device. Everybody who's system has running an NTP daemon which can give an accurate time-indication can join the project. Not only is it handy to have accurate time on your workstation to be able to see when you need to leave the house to catch the train in time, it is also usefull to be able to accurately correlate events between your system and others in case one gets hacked."

1 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Why we removed our servers from the pool... by jafo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We've run public NTP servers for the better part of a decade now, mostly for the convenience of geographically local folks like the various LUGs. When I found out about the pool, I had our servers added there. Everything was fine for a few months, then over a month we started getting phone calls from firewall admins about how our time servers were attacking their networks. Every time a machine in their network would ask our servers for the time, our servers responded with 10 packets spaced at 1 second intervals, so these improperly configured firewalls were logging a lot of packets from us.

    I finally shut it down after one particular call, the third that week, where the caller was rude and abusive when I suggested that he should be doing more investigation about the traffic before calling someone else to complain about it. Being a public service, it's just not something that scales well to have to field these calls. I hated to do it, but it was just too much of a distraction.

    I'm not saying that you shouldn't add your servers to the pool... I just thought it was an amusing story.

    Sean