Computer overclocking and help forum dedicated to helping everyone overclock their entire computer system from the CPU, graphics card and memory for the best possible performance.

Total news: 0
Last news: ---

Creating Trust Online

Total news: 0
Last news: ---

News from the NTP Pool Project

Total news: 15
Last news: January 1, 1970 00:00:00

As mentioned a few months ago, NTP operates exclusively with UTC time. If your system is (typically) one hour off after syncing with the NTP Pool then its because your operating system needs to be configured with the correct timezone and daylight saving time setting. If you live in a place that recently changed rules for daylight saving time you need to make sure... - [Read more]

We hit another milestone in the last few days with 1000 active servers in Europe!

Now of course we need to get more servers added so we dont slump below that number again - right now the number is 999. Who will take us back over 1000? :-)

Growth in North America have practically stalled on the other hand; we could use more servers there too (and as always in... - [Read more]

The goal of the NTP Pool is to provide accurate time to everybody. Though internally its really about serving DNS requests. Quite a lot of them, and ideally fast.

Through history weve ended up with using the pool.ntp.org domain for client access which for performance isnt really optimal, but its what we have. Through a bit of administrative division it ends up that just to find out who to ask for the IP of 1.fedora.pool.ntp.org you have to send a whole lot of DNS requests... - [Read more]

In many places around the world March is the month of changing clocks as daylight saving time comes and goes.

Usually a number of users write to tell me that the NTP Pool is an hour off during this time and in the fall when clocks change the other way. Happily it isn’t so; because NTP is based on the Read more]

Due to the distributed nature of the pool system we don’t know exactly; but based on some sample measurements we estimate that the overall pool system on average handles somewhere between 40 and 120 thousand NTP requests per second.

If we assume it’s 50,000 a second, that makes a bit over 4300 million requests a day!

In a year that’s about 1500 trillion (american) / billion (other countries) requests a day. (1576800000000, if I’m counting the... - [Read more]

Happy New Year everyone! Please take a moment to remind your fellow sysadmins about registering their servers in the pool if they have servers meeting the requirements (~100% uptime and a static and stable IP address).

As mentioned earlier the pool system now has partial support for IPv6 servers.

Its currently limited to just getting the servers registered though! They are not monitored... - [Read more]

This morning I pushed the latest version of the NTP Pool Server code to www.pool.ntp.org. The news are:

• Runs on the code from the git repository

• Translations are back! The end-user portions of the site is now available in English, Dutch and French.

• Partial IPv6 support (thanks to Martin von Löwis). More... - [Read more]

The pool keeps growing (although we still need more servers).

Recently weve added zones and servers in Costa Rica, Venezuela, Serbia, Croatia, El Salvador and Read more]

Ive been adding support to the NTP Pool site for translations again.

Before I took over the site it was translated in a bunch of languages, but as the site got dynamic features and more pages we lost that. Now its back!

If you are interested in helping then send me a mail at ask@develooper.com. Experience with gettext (".po") files or Locale::Maketext lexicons and with version control (Subversion specifically) will be helpful, but if you are willing to... - [Read more]

Most people dont know, but the NTP Pool web site and monitoring software is actually licensed under the Apache Software License 2.0.

I did that to make it easier if at some point the community decides that my stewardship of the NTP Pool isnt good enough. Since installing the pool site doesnt make much sense other than for development I dont make ordinary releases, but all the code is available in my public Read more]

In our ongoing process of getting the NTP Pool IPv6 compatible we took a first (small!) step getting the website partially available via IPv6. For now its via an IPv6-only hostname: www6.ntppool.org.

So far the anecdotal reports are that its working fine for people with IPv6. The next tests will be to see how connectivity is affected for everyone else if a host has both AAAA (IPv6) and A (IPv4) records in DNS.

As part of the... - [Read more]

We were upgrading the servers that the pool web site is running on yesterday and had an outage for a few hours. It should all be back to normal now.

The upgrade was (mostly) about getting all our servers up from RHEL 3 to version 5 (before we had mostly RHEL3 boxes and a few with 4 and 5 ...). Now when they are all the same its easier... - [Read more]

Early this morning (PST) we had a few hours of "sub-optimal" performance on the monitoring server. A hundred servers or so were marked "bad" and got unnecessary warning mails because of it. users of the pool should not have been impacted. Work is in progress to permanently improve on this.

If you are IPv6 connected, the www.pool.ntp.org site will now be delivered to you via IPv6.

I did tests on a hundred thousand visitors to the site and nobody who could connect with IPv4 had trouble talking to a site with both "AAAA" and "A" records. The test only included users with javascript however, so it could still miss appliances, older boxes etc. More tests are needed to make the pool.ntp.org service "ipv6 enabled".

Sometimes I’m asked if the NTP Pool really needs more servers. The answer is yes, always!

While the number of servers has grown nicely over the years, so has the number of users so we need

The only (tricky) requirement is that you have a static IP address and expect the server (and IP) to be around for a long time. ntpd doesn’t deal well with changing IP addresses (yet), so this is important.

How... - [Read more]