NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power • Hacker News Board

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#21

Post by adastra22 » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 10:02 AM UTC

_zoltan_ wrote: post #19

adastra22 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is HN, but the internet is pretty low on the list of things NIST time standards are important for.

could you list 3 things that you think are more important than the internet? (I know the internet is going to be fine; I just want to understand what you think ranks higher globally...)

Mostly scientific stuff like astronomical observations — e.g. did this event observed at one telescope coincide with neutrinos detected at this other observatory.

Note I didn’t say they are more important than the Internet. That’s a value judgement in any case. I said that NIST level 0 NTp servers are more important to these use cases than they are to the Internet.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#22

Post by adastra22 » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 10:04 AM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #18

adastra22 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is HN, but the internet is pretty low on the list of things NIST time standards are important for.

But pretty high on the list that NIST NTP is important for (since it leaves the building through the internet).

If NIST NTP goes down, the internet doesn’t go down. But atomic clocks drifting does upset many scientific experiments, which would effectively go down for the duration of the outage.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#23

Post by crazydoggers » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 10:10 AM UTC

Status of NIST time servers:

https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#24

Post by glkindlmann » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 10:11 AM UTC

Of the various internet .+P, NTP is one I never learned about as a student, so now I'm looking at its web page [1] by its creator David L. Mills (1938-2024). I've found one video of him giving a retrospective of his extensive internet work; he talks about NTP at 34:51 [2] and later at 56:26 [3].

[1] https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html

[2] https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?si=WXJCV_v0qlZQK3m4&t=2092

[3] https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?si=K80ThtYZWcOAxUga&t=3386

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#25

Post by willis936 » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 10:16 AM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #22

willis936 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But pretty high on the list that NIST NTP is important for (since it leaves the building through the internet).

If NIST NTP goes down, the internet doesn’t go down. But atomic clocks drifting does upset many scientific experiments, which would effectively go down for the duration of the outage.

This is the reason GP listed out all the alternative robust NTP services that are GPS disciplined, freely available, and used as redundant sources by any responsible timekeeper.

What atomic clocks are disciplined by NTP anyway? Local GPS disciplining is the standard. If you're using NTP you don't need precision or accuracy in your timekeeping.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#26

Post by themafia » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 10:16 AM UTC

> Facility operators anticipated needing to shutdown the heat-exchange infrastructure providing air cooling to many parts of the building, including some internal networking closets. As a result, many of these too were preemptively shutdown with the result that our group lacks much of the monitoring and control capabilities we ordinarily have

Having a parallel low bandwidth, low power, low waste heat network infrastructure for this suddenly seems useful.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#27

Post by ssl-3 » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC

glkindlmann wrote: post #24

Of the various internet .+P, NTP is one I never learned about as a student, so now I'm looking at its web page [1] by its creator David L. Mills (1938-2024). I've found one video of him giving a retrospective of his extensive internet work; he talks about NTP at 34:51 [2] and later at 56:26 [3]. [1] https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html [2] https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?si=WXJCV_v0qlZQK3m4&t=2092 [3] https://yout…

HN discussion shortly after Dave Mills died, early in 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051246

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#28

Post by Izmaki » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 10:20 AM UTC

_zoltan_ wrote: post #19

adastra22 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is HN, but the internet is pretty low on the list of things NIST time standards are important for.

could you list 3 things that you think are more important than the internet? (I know the internet is going to be fine; I just want to understand what you think ranks higher globally...)

The ability for humankind to communicate across the entire globe at nearly 1/4 of the speed of light has drastically accelerated our technological advancement. There is no doubt that the internet is a HUGE addition to society.

It's not super important when compared to basic needs like plumbing, food, electricity, medical assistance and other silly things we take for granted but are heavily dependent on. We all saw what happened to hospitals during the early stages of the COVID pandemic; we had plenty of internet and electricity but were struggling on the medical part. That was quite bad... I'm not sure if it's any worse if an entire country/continent lost access to the Internet. Quite a lot of our core infrastructure components in society rely on this. And a fair bit of it relies on a common understanding of what time "now" is.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#29

Post by guenthert » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 10:22 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #13

cdfuller wrote: post #5

Can anybody expand on the implications of this? Being unfamiliar with it, it's hard to tell if this is a minor blip that happens all the time, or if it's potentially a major issue that could cause cascading errors equal to the hype of Y2K.

Google has their own fleet of atomic clocks and time servers. So does AWS. So does Microsoft. So does Ubuntu. They're not going to drift enough for months to cause trouble. So the Internet can ride through this, mostly. The main problem will be services that assume at least one of the NIST time servers is up. Somewhere, there's going to be something that won't work right when all the NIST NTP servers are down. But wh…

Ubuntu using atomic clocks would surprise me. Sure they could, but it's not obvious to me why they would spend $$$$ on such. More plausible to me seems that they would be using GPSDO as reference clocks (in this context, about as good as your own atomic clock), iff they were running their own time servers. Google finds only that they are using servers from the NTP Pool Project, which will be using a variety of reference clocks.

If you have information on what they actually are using internally, please share.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#30

Post by synack » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 10:24 AM UTC

genidoi wrote: post #17

Animats wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has their own fleet of atomic clocks and time servers. So does AWS. So does Microsoft. So does Ubuntu. They're not going to drift enough for months to cause trouble. So the Internet can ride through this, mostly. The main problem will be services that assume at least one of the NIST time servers is up. Somewhere, there's going to be something that won't work right when all the NIST NTP servers are down. But wh…

Atomic clock non-expert here, what does having a fleet of atomic clocks entail and why would the hyperscalers bother?

Spanner depends on having a time source with bounded error to maintain consistency. Google accomplishes this by having GPS and atomic clocks in several datacenters.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...