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Why is my NTP server costing $500 per year? Part 1 (2014)

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Re: Why is my NTP server costing $500 per year? Part 1 (2014)

#31

Post by niij »

agumonkey wrote: post #25
DanBC wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Netgear stopped doing it. Netgear issued patches for the devices. Most people never update their server firmware, and we're talking about over 700,000 devices. The university still gets considerable traffic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTP_server_misuse_and_abuse#NE...

Can't the university throttle non local connections ? (netgear could have provided the hardware ;)

It is a public NTP server. Throttling public defeats the point.

Re: Why is my NTP server costing $500 per year? Part 1 (2014)

#33

Post by cmrx64 »

fxlv wrote: post #30

I'm surprised there are no comments about the fact that these guys decided to run NTPD on a VM.

I had the same thought. Does the world really need another (presumably) stratum-3 server running in Amazon's cluster, when Amazon already runs a pool of stratum-2 servers? ([0-3].amazon.pool.ntp.org).

Re: Why is my NTP server costing $500 per year? Part 1 (2014)

#34

Post by late2part »

niij wrote: post #31
agumonkey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't the university throttle non local connections ? (netgear could have provided the hardware ;)

It is a public NTP server. Throttling public defeats the point.

Not really. If an NTP client gets 1/10th of the updates that it wants, it will still keep reasonably good time.

Re: Why is my NTP server costing $500 per year? Part 1 (2014)

#37

Post by nickysielicki »

late2part wrote: post #34
niij wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a public NTP server. Throttling public defeats the point.

Not really. If an NTP client gets 1/10th of the updates that it wants, it will still keep reasonably good time.

Keeping a table of clients and their last-updated time is probably more expensive than just sending them a response.

Re: Why is my NTP server costing $500 per year? Part 1 (2014)

#38

Post by kondor6c »

fxlv wrote: post #30

I'm surprised there are no comments about the fact that these guys decided to run NTPD on a VM.

You're not supposed to run an NTP server on a VM. The CPU cycles can be taken from the guest and perhaps used by the host or another guest. Other options that are available, is to drill a hole in the data center and run a GPS receiver to the roof and get the time from the GPS satellites. I think that is something many VPS/cloud providers will not allow.

Edit: s/your/you're/

Re: Why is my NTP server costing $500 per year? Part 1 (2014)

#39

Post by dom0 »

nickysielicki wrote: post #37
late2part wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. If an NTP client gets 1/10th of the updates that it wants, it will still keep reasonably good time.

Keeping a table of clients and their last-updated time is probably more expensive than just sending them a response.

Randomly dropping a percentage of requests is stateless.

Re: Why is my NTP server costing $500 per year? Part 1 (2014)

#40

Post by simtel20 »

cmrx64 wrote: post #33
fxlv wrote: post #30

I'm surprised there are no comments about the fact that these guys decided to run NTPD on a VM.

I had the same thought. Does the world really need another (presumably) stratum-3 server running in Amazon's cluster, when Amazon already runs a pool of stratum-2 servers? ([0-3].amazon.pool.ntp.org).

By my recent reading of the AWS docs, those pool addresses are not run by Amazon. They are DNS names that allow NTP load from AWS to the NTP pool to be distributed more fairly.
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