The NTP Pool Project turns 20

This year the NTP Pool Project has been serving time to the world for 20 years!

Trillions and trillions of DNS requests have been served to billions of clients, with the NTP requests handled by thousands of NTP servers across the world day and night.

Development on the project ebbs and flows, but maintenance and upgrades on the production infrastructure is consistent – and constant.

Our community is active; and the NTP server operators even more so with almost 2,000 operators managing the 3,000 IPv4 NTP IPs and 1,600 IPv6 IPs active in the system.

Since last spring the beta site has been running a new NTP server monitoring system that’s nearly ready for the production site.

How the vendor DNS zones are managed have also been vastly improved in this upgrade, paving the way for (finally!) expanding IPv6 support and decreasing the dependency on too few servers in some of the underserved regions. I also expect it for new operators in underserved regions to participate, because the updates will better balance traffic in those areas.

When I took over development and maintenance of the project in 2005 I couldn’t have imagined what crucial internet infrastructure this project would be in 2023.

The upcoming changes are bringing further dependability and longevity to the infrastructure and the project as a whole. I’m excited to see where the next decade takes us.