This weekend the system that monitors the NTP servers in the NTP Pool got a major overhaul! NTP servers are now monitored from a number of monitors across the world, usually closer to the server than the single monitor was before. One of the most frustrating things about operating an NTP server in the NTP Pool was how random network issues far away from the server would impact the score. Sometimes cause an email to be sent to the operator about potential problems.

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.

The main website (www.ntppool.org / www.pool.ntp.org) doesn’t set any browser cookies. Some access logs are generated strictly for diagnostics purposes. No long term storage or analytics on user behavior is attempted. The manage website (manage.ntppool.org) sets a cookie on login to track authentication. The site also keeps a record of the account information you provide and NTP server IPs that are registered. We try hard to not keep any information that’s not essential for operating the system.

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.

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.