Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The NTP Pool Needs More Servers — Yours, If Available

Posted by timothy on from the otherwise-you'll-start-waking-up-last-week dept.

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."

4 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. $25 Raspberry Pi + $27 GPS reciever? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Some quick searching shows one can get a USB GPS receiver for $27 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.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  2. Too many idiots are pissing in the pool. by jcochran · · Score: 4, 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.

    1. Re:Too many idiots are pissing in the pool. by profplump · · Score: 4, 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.

  3. Re:Do you need a clock? by Anonymous Coward · · 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/