NTP Pool

Packet is awesome. When we started planning our recent unplanned server move, we investigated options for having not one, but two sites, for the “hub” systems for the NTP Pool. With 4000 NTP servers and hundreds of millions of clients using the ... [More] system, it really should be a given! Evaluating our options on a ridiculously short timeframe, Packet stood out as an interesting choice, though we were a little apprehensive at first if their setup would be too unusual compared to more familiar options. After a quick chat with some of the friendly staff at Packet, we were off to the races to see if we could get everything migrated in less than a week of nights and weekends. If we could, we’d be able to move the physical servers the following Sunday without downtime to any critical services, and get us closer to having proper redundancy. Working with the Packet system has been fascinating and extremely productive. Despite having done this sort of work for several decades, it was a surprise how mixing familiar capabilities, APIs and abstractions opened new ways for quickly building and managing powerful, reliable and scalable infrastructure. [Less]

The beta site has been updated with new features for managing the accounts. Until now each server had to be associated with just one user login. In the new system servers are associated with an account that can have multiple user logins. If you can, please try it out and post bug reports or suggestions in the development forum or via email.

The NTP Pool consists of (as of this writing) more than 4000 NTP servers provided by the community, about 40 DNS servers and a good handful of “hub servers” running the website, databases, monitoring (for NTP, DNS, etc) and a bunch of other software ... [More] to keep the system going. This spring we learned that the facility the systems were in was being decommissioned and we needed to find other arrangements, quickly. [Less]

As you might have seen in the news or from the US CERT, there’s an internal counter in the GPS messages that will “rollover” this week. Poorly implemented GPS receivers might lose track of time because of this. Many servers in the NTP Pool are using ... [More] GPS signals to set the time, either directly or indirectly from another server that listens for GPS signals. The expected impact on users of the NTP Pool is very little or none at all. [Less]

Daniel Ziegenberg wrote a tutorial for Digital Ocean on configuring NTP for the NTP Pool on Ubuntu. Oliver Nadler has another tutorial covering non-Ubuntu, too.

Daniel Ziegenberg wrote a tutorial for Digital Ocean on configuring NTP for the NTP Pool on Ubuntu.

Daniel Ziegenberg wrote a tutorial for Digital Ocean on configuring NTP for the NTP Pool on Ubuntu. Oliver Nadler has another tutorial covering non-Ubuntu, too.

There’s a new forum for discussion related to the NTP Pool at community.ntppool.org. Please come join us. There are a couple interesting threads about the recent leap second and lots of empty space for your questions or suggestions. :-) The NTP ... [More] Pool mailing lists are generously hosted on lists.ntp.org on the Network Time Foundation infrastructure. Those servers moved this summer and it’s been a bit of “rough seas” since. Over the summer hundreds of people got unsubscribed because mail deliveries were failing and the lists were bouncing all mails for a while in the second half of December. We’ll keep having the mailing list, too. In particular for people new to the project having us build out the new forum will be better (search, better access to archives, getting more mail in your email inbox is optional, etc). Happy new year! [Less]

There’s a new forum for discussion related to the NTP Pool at community.ntppool.org. Please come join us. There are a couple interesting threads about the recent leap second and lots of empty space for your questions or suggestions. :-)

There’s a new forum for discussion related to the NTP Pool at community.ntppool.org. Please come join us. There are a couple interesting threads about the recent leap second and lots of empty space for your questions or suggestions. :-)