NTP Pool News

Today I updated the graphs from being generated by rrdtool to be generated with Javascript and SVG using the wonderful d3.js library. You can see an example of the new graphs or if you have a server in the pool you can use the new graphs.

There are a lot of things I wanted to do that using RRD made hard. Splitting the central parts of the system across more servers than the 2-3 it's running on now. Supporting multiple monitoring nodes. More interactive graphs. Showing historical data. Etcetera.

None of it impossible with RRDtool or for example it's cousin graphite, but those tools really just aren't a good match for our needs here.

The update today is just the beginning. Over on the "beta pool" we're already running with multiple monitors and on my development system I'll soon add some more features to the graphs so you can see the details of individual data points, go back in time a bit and so on. There are also a number of places on the site still where the old graphs are used even if your browser does support SVG.

I know many of you are using the old graphs on your own websites, ops charts, startpages and so on, and I intent do continue to maintain them at the current level for as long as possible. They're also supposed to show if you visit with a browser without Javascript and SVG support.

When the features and API have stabilized a bit, I'll also make a widget so you can put the D3 graphs on other sites and document the JSON API so you can use it to extract the data similar to the current CSV option.

As announced some days ago on the pool-dev mailing list, yesterday I moved the "manage your server" section to a separate site. This helps keep the main site fast and made it easier to make all connections to that site encrypted.

Today the NTP Pool site got some changes to run better and faster. In the process there was 10 minutes of downtime late Tuesday (pacific time) and through much of the day Wednesday some pages might have loaded in a language that wasn't your usual preference.

Speaking of languages, the website can (always) use help with translations. On the beta site I enabled some of the partially translated languages to show up. Japanese was just added there today thanks to Taro Yoshimoto.

Translations of languages not on the list at all are of course also welcome.

World IPv6 Day is over, but we'll continue to serve AAAA (IPv6) records for 2.pool.ntp.org (and 2.europe, 2.fedora, 2.debian, etc).

So far no problems have been reported, even the servers going through IPv6 tunnels seem to work fine.

We already have almost 200 IPv6 servers in the pool; though that's less than 10% of all the pool servers and they're mostly in a handful of countries versus the wide deployment we have for IPv4.

The pool system is tracking, but not yet showing separate stats for IPv6 servers by default. (You can however "hack" the graph URLs to show them by adding -v6 to the file name, for example the European counts.

Below is the graph for the total number of IPv6 servers in the pool.

While the system is rebuilding some internal statistics, monitoring of some of the IPv4 servers in the pool have been suspended. They'll be reactivated in about 6 hours. All servers with IDs below 8500 are being monitored again after a break of a couple of hours.

In addition all IPv6 servers are being monitored now and are slowly increasing their scores for inclusion in the "2." pool!

If you are following the pool mailing lists you'll have seen that the last days have carried a flurry of activity as new code for IPv6 support (and distributed monitoring) has been tested on the "beta pool" site.

June 8th is World IPv6 Day where many sites small and big will enable the IPv6 protocol for the day to help test everyones IPv6 readiness.

Here at the NTP pool we are today enabling monitoring of IPv6 servers; and over the next 12 hours we will start in a limited fashion to serve AAAA (IPv6) DNS records to clients asking for them. Right now the pool site is enjoying a brief break while the new code and database updates are being deployed.

For now this will only be on the "2.pool.ntp.org" zone; but unlike Google, Facebook and most other sites we are not planning to turn this off again on June 9th.

One of the database replicas had some corruption; so I took down the primary database briefly to run some consistency checks there, too. This is taking down the NTP Pool website and delaying some of the monitoring.

Everything will be back shortly.

Today the NTP Pool site was upgraded to run on Plack and Starman instead of Apache.

Please let me know if you encounter any trouble!

This was a bit of work to get done and with this done I’ll get back to adding new features to the system. First up: Integrating some of the contributed translations and finishing the changes to support distributed monitoring and IPv6 support that Martin von Löwis started a while back.

"pool.ntp.org" is serviced by a number of DNS servers. One of them, a.ntpns.org, is actually several servers in an anycast cloud.

Until today it was just served by two nodes, one in Los Angeles and another in Luxembourg (both provided by YellowBot). Today a third node in Northern California is joining in, hosted by Sonic.net!

If you are able to provide a server (most virtual servers work, too) on a network with BGP routers to join the anycast cloud, please email ask@develooper.com.

Earlier today the website and monitoring system had several 10-15 minute outages while the databases got moved around; backups reconfigured etc.

Our friends at sonic.net have for years provided some servers that are used for backups and auxiliary functions to the main servers hosted by Phyber.

Recently Sonic.net also started hosting one of the excellent GPS Time Servers donated by Meinberg and when the system eventually starts doing distributed monitoring their servers will likely be the first "second monitoring system".

(While looking for links for this post, I noticed that if you want to rent a server from Sonic, they have a bunch of affordable options).

The pool servers are having a 45 minute outage to be moved to a new datacenter.