Sep 6, 2019
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 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.
Sep 5, 2019
Aug 27, 2019
Apr 5, 2019
May 21, 2017
Jan 1, 2017
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. :-)
Dec 19, 2016
Since last Tuesday some countries have seen an excessive number of queries to the NTP Pool.
After much detective work on nanog (conclusion) and the #NTP IRC channel it was determined to be a buggy Snapchat app update.
Nov 29, 2016
Nov 4, 2016
The IETF has published a new version of NTP Best Current Practices documenting learned best practices on how to run NTP servers and clients.
If you know a little about the NTP protocol reading it will be a quick way to learn more about how it works “in the wild” (including on your own systems).
Aug 27, 2016
Thanks to the kind folks at statuspage.io we now have a system status page. It’s also available at an alternate domain.
Most of the data is updated manually, so it won’t be any better than the busy humans can manage, but it’ll be a better system for giving system updates than posting here (or on the dicussion mailing list).