Slashdot Mirror
D-Link Settles Danish Time Dispute
igb writes "The Register reports that DLink has settled the time server dispute described a little over a month ago here on Slashdot. They're going to stop using an NTP server they're not really authorized to chime with, and they've reached an amicable settlement over the use by existing products. The details of the settlement are, not unsurprisingly, somewhat vague, but let's hope that the good guys aren't out of pocket any more."
than to challenge a Time Lord!
It's strange these companies can't afford to set up a few of their own NTP servers instead of overloading servers that don't have the bandwidth. It it's because they are clueless or they are cheap?
And likely more. I've been telling my friends not to buy them, and I know of at least one buying decision that was made specifically for that reason that cost them $120 worth of sales of USB wireless adapters.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
hopefully they bought him a server and bandwidth, that would cost them less than 1 executives monthly wage, some companies/individuals are so greedy that they become blinded by their very existance
money really is everything to some people, at least criminals have ethics unlike the "your fired" generations
Their hardware is crap. I've had their routers overheat and die, I've never seen a D-Link wireless setup that could be considered stable. I've owned network cards from D-Link that prevented another computer connected, by way of a crossover cable, from booting DOS. Let me repeat that: A D-Link card was sending out enough junk that it prevented a different computer from booting.
The bottom of the article says "D-Link remains committed to being a good corporate and network citizen." Screw that. They have never been either of these things they are "committed" to.
I, Anonymous Coward (the most prolific poster Slashdot has ever seen) hereby "commit myself to never purchase, recommend, or in any way interact with D-Link and their products, as much as possible, until such time as hell freezes over."
Part of the settlement involves him putting on his website "D-Link is dedicated to remaining a good corporate and network citizen."
Otherwise, considering his previous level of frustration, there's no chance he would shill for them like that.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Fook, you're a dumbass. Strata One servers are not supposed to be used by Joe Bloggs dinky firewall.
Seems to me that if you run a (public) NTP server with a publicly available IP address and/or DNS resolution, that means anyone (public) can use the (public) service - no?
The reason for this is to avoid problems like this, where the NTP server is overloaded or the NTP client is mis-configured and overloads the server or network.
Is silently migrate my legit users to another ntp server and then set the D-Link'ed ones to something like Klingon time or something bizarre, streach 8 hour days to 10 hours, etc. Of course that wouldn't solve the excess traffic, but you can get creative with revenge, especially when you're in the right.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
But if you have no problems with the DDOS aspect of this, let me know and I'll send you an e-mail attachment showing you how to be part of something bigger than your single server. ;^D
Perhaps then, if it still seems ok, you should do a little reading instead of trying to apply uninformed logic to the question.
p _save_the_endangered_time.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTP_vandalism
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/02/hel
http://www.pool.ntp.org/
Stratum 1 is to be only used by stratum 2. Joe Blow worldwide is not stratum 2. Clear violation of access policies here.
The "Internet Time" tab on the date/time systray control lets you sync with time.nist.gov which is not supposed to be used by clients.
The latest Slashdot meme.
There is now a way for vendors to use the NTP pool. See http://www.pool.ntp.org/vendors.html for details.
Someone at D-Link should simply have realized the mistake and paid for a few very fast servers to sit at a hosting facillity and respond to the requests -- and all the requests already using that service -- for as long as the Danes were willing to point the DNS entry for that server to them.
In the scheme of things, and from a marketing perspective, anything else is stupid and a waste of good will.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
We used a Belkin wireless router for quite some time with a cable modem - no problems. In comes Verizon with FIOS and they give us a free D-Link wireless router. My wife was constantly complaining about dropped connection. I tried relocating the D-Link all over the place to no avail. We switched back to the Belkin and BAM no problems at all. I give D-Link a grade of..."D"
Do you like his hat? It's made of money!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
If something is "not unsurprising" doesn't that mean it was surprising? Like it was suprising that the details of the settlement were so vague?
I don't know. I'm just asking. Irregardless, I could care less...
I haven't heard "out of pocket" since the early 90's.
I first saw it under Win98 back in 2000; no reason to believe anything's changed.
I realize a few years back, when bandwidth came at appreciable cost, this might have been the case, but now?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
For the fun of it, let's go through with what we had:
A friend of mine was having some trouble with a couple of machines at his house. I grabbed my testbed and a laptop from the shop and popped on over. I find he has no hub when I get there, oh no, so we just go with the crossover cable he was using to tie his two machines together.
The ill-fated pair was like this:
Machine A: His computer, with D-Link DFE-530tx (something like that)
Machine B: My testbed, with a 3Com some-such and a load of DOS based diagnostics (Win98 also available, but not used in this situation).
We hook his machine up to mine, he's up and running in Windows, I try to boot mine into DOS. Oh no, it just hangs and does nothing. Try the laptop. Same thing. Unplug my machine from the crossover cable, boots up fine. Plug in crossover cable, reboot, just hangs. See a pattern forming. Try the crossover cable between my testbed and the laptop. No problem. Remove the D-Link card, substitute with the card (Intel) from his upstairs machine. Test bed and the now Intel-ed computer talk just fine, both boot no problems.
There's bad hardware, then there is BAD hardware. Don't get me wrong, I make decent chunk of change for service calls to my customers, some of the calls for D-Link related problems (but I won't insult you by claiming it is the majority of the calls). But I will NOT screw up my and my busines' reputation by ever, EVER suggesting or recommending D-Link.
It worked pretty well at first, but the number of dropped connections and strange pauses started to increase. At first I thought it was just a lot of traffic on the network. But I realized that if I reset it, things were ok for about five minutes. Then, after months of that, it started going crazy: LEDs blinking in order and it wouldn't respond even on the wired Ethernet. So I reset the firmware. Didn't help.
I presume there is some part of the hardware slowly failing or it is overheating (because it is ok for a few minutes). But no matter how I orient it it still fails.
A real piece of junk.
The BIOS shouldn't even be aware of the network - it's just a bunch of random signals on a PCI bus at this point.
The bootloader shouldn't care about the network - unless you're doing a network boot, it probably doesn't even know about networks.
The OS could get confussed . . . attepmting to use ARP/RARP/BOOTP/DHCP (or perhaps any of a half-dozen other services which it might expect).
I don't suppose you captured any of the bogus traffic which caused this problem (using snoop/tcpdump/whatever)? I'm not sure I understand why a network card would create traffic on its own, let alone how that bogus traffic could prevent the routine booting of a separate system.
What D-Link did was unprofessional and irresponsible, they should be condemned for it, and Kamp had every right to complain to them. Nevertheless, it's good that this has been resolved without legal action. If Kamp had actually prevailed in court, it might have set a dangerous precedent: Linux distributions are distributed with hundreds of preconfigured links to all sorts of sites. Generally, those sites have agreed to that, but if their ownership or their policies changed, this could cause serious trouble for the distributor.
I'm sorry, but given his statement about "good corporate citizens", I'm assuming that the jackass lawyers at DLink tried to force a settlment rather than risk more bad PR they said "here's the cash if you STFU forever"
Reading between the lines, D-Link only acted like "good corporate citizens" to benefit their sales and shareholders after bad press, not because it was ethical to do so.
Sorry, I will maintain my stance of no more D-Link products on my personal systems, and I certainly will never recommend one where I work--Until D-Link discloses full details of the settlement, issues a public apology, and contributes back to the community they tried to screw over.
When you respond to a request to stop being so evil with greater evil...the original apology requested is no longer sufficient.
I've used wireless hardware from the following manufacturers:
D-Link - DWL-650, DWL-G650, DI-624
The original 650 wasn't a stellar performer but it wasn't horrible. The G650+624 combo was pretty decent. I only returned it in favor of waiting to see where things went as far as MIMO gear.
Belkin - Can't remember, it was a b-only router
Utter crap. Couldn't last more than 2-3 days without crashing. Died permanently in just over a year.
Microsoft - MN500
In true Microsoft tradition, their software may be crap but their hardware products are actually decent. The MN500 was the most solid and consistent performing 11b kit I have used so far.
Netgear - WPN824 router + WPN511 NIC
Stellar. Utterly stellar. I love the 824. WPN511 is only retired due to the fact that my new laptop has a built-in Intel PRO/Wireless 8945 a/b/g NIC.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Nope. It was a few years ago and I left it as just a bizarre hardware failure. Remove the D-Link network card, replace with an Intel one, the whole system works fine afterwards. For all I know, it somehow shorted out internally into a cyclotron and was pumping out X-Ray radiation that left me sterile. I don't have kids yet.
I think the brand name just has a curse on it. Or it was sending nasty voltage. Don't know, don't care.
Poul-Henning Kamp got 200.000 DDK (Danish kroner) which is about 33.000 US$.
;-). This information is from the danish version of computerworld online at http://www.computerworld.dk/
;-)
The settlement states that Poul-Henning Kamp must not talk about the history of problems which the D-Link routers caused. But He tells danish press that any future problemes causes by D-link equiptment will be posted around the net
His homepage is http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/
For those in america: Denmark is not the capital of sweden
I assure you, if someone shipped 1,000,000 web appliances that used your little home web server as a home page, you'd be pissed too. Or your DNS server as their address resolver. He doesn't mind occasional use, but these guys embedded his server address into ROM and and shipped boatloads of them.
This post is definitely insightful. Sorry to see your kharma is so low your posting level is 0. It looks like it's because lots of people disagreed with you last time this same subject came up. On slashdot, the squeaky wheel gets the axe.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
IMHO they should donate their best products to him, a "powered by D-Link" small png along with the bill they paid.
So, that would be a "better ending" to a legit fight helping their amazingly bad image. I mean, DOSing a public,amateur server with your products and getting mentioned at Slashdot. Can be worse?
It is good ending btw.
... for me to abandon dlink because they're too cheap to put WDS in their wireless routers.
You're not the only one.
= 381090&tstart=0
It seems that quite a few people have experienced odd behaviors as a result of interactions between Linksys routers and some Macs.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID
This thread in particular is about the Mac Book Pro, but I've heard it happens with some other computers also; no clue why or what, but the solution that most people seem to be using is "buy a new router" of a brand other than Linksys. Contributing to this is the general brain-deadedness of their tech support staff (and to be fair, Apple's as well), who just point fingers.
FWIW, I have a Netgear MR314 running at my parents house that I set up for them when they first got broadband and the thing is a champ; I think it's been running constantly for 4-1/2 years now (if I did my math right) and the only times it hasn't worked is when the power is out. Damn thing is built like a tank, too: sheet metal chassis, none of this blue plastic crap. I've yet to get a Linksys product that's anywhere near as stable, and based on this article I'm not going to run out and get a D-Link.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Can someone point me to where Slashdot previously covered this? Also, I recall some years back that there was a router that decided to randomly re-route 12.5% of all requests to non-existent web pages to the router manufacturer's web page that said, "You're obviously lost on the Internet --don't you want to pay us money so we can surf the web for real?" Which company was that --was that Belkin?
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Okay, sorry to reply to myself, but I found a cache of Poul-Henning Kamp's posting about D-Link. This was at http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:LAdoqMDzqM0J:n et127.com/2006/04/07/open-letter-to-d-link-about-t heir-ntp-vandalism/+%22have+been+accused+of+extort ion.+I+have+been+told+that+I%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=cln k&cd=1
(I'm not sure of any of those gibberish-looking parameters change over time.)
I think the convention is to post Anonymously to prevent karma-whoring, but the last time I tried to post anonymously, it didn't work. It seems to work when I preview this post. Okay, here's the web page:
Poul-Henning Kamp, Slagelse, Denmark, writes:
When I contacted D-Link back in November 2005 about the way D-Link products abused my NTP-server, I expected to get in touch with somebody who understood what they were talking about, I expected them to admit that D-Link had made a bad decision and I expected that D-Link would make good on the damage they were responsible for.
For the last five months I have wasted a lot of time trying to reach some kind of agreement with the Californian lawyer which D-Link put on the case. I can't quite make up my mind if D-Link's lawyer negotiates in bad faith or is merely uninformed, I tend to suspect the latter, but either way, as of this morning I decided to cut my losses.
Since no one else at D-Link has reacted to my numerous emails, I have no other means of getting in touch with D-Link other than an open letter. I realize that it will be inconvenient and embarrasing for D-Link to have this matter exposed in public this way, but I seem to have no other choice.
I will now lay out the case below in such detail that any moderately knowledgeable person should be able to understand it, and hopefully somebody, somewhere in D-Link will contact me so we can get this matter resolved.
What is NTP?
NTP is Network Time Protocol, a protocol that allows computers to transfer timestamps across the internet so that they can set their clocks to the correct time.
A number of NTP servers on the internet are connected to radio timecode receivers, GPS receivers or in some cases directly to national time laboratories primary atomic frequency standards.
How not to implement NTP in a product
A number of D-Link products, so far I have at least identified DI-604, DI-614+, DI-624, DI-754, DI-764, DI-774, DI-784, VDI604 and VDI624, contain a list of NTP servers in their firmware and using some sort of algorithm, they pick one and send packets to it.
This is about as wrong a way to do things as one can imagine. There is no way D-Link can change the list once the product is shipped, unless D-Link can persuade the customer to upgrade the firmware.
How to implement NTP in a product
The correct way, as I have pointed out to D-Link repeatedly, is to query a D-Link controlled DNS entry like "ntp.dlink.com" and populate this DNS entry with the list of NTP servers to be queried. That would allow D-Link to add or remove servers from the list by changing the DNS server files and all deployed devices would automatically see the update next time.
If D-Link had implemented the NTP feature this way, my complaint could have been handled to my full satisfaction with an emailed apology and a few minutes of D-Link's DNS administrators time.
The problem
As you can see in the table on the right side, D-Link included the NTP server "GPS.dix.dk" in the list of NTP servers to query, and they did so without asking for permission.
I have no idea how many devices D-Link has sold, but between 75% and 90% of the packets which arrive at my server come from D-Link products via this mechanism.
Why D-Link ne
Can you give an example of a project that hardcodes a network address that they don't explicit permission to use?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?