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NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

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Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#131

Post by ufocia »

throw0101c wrote: post #117
PunchyHamster wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

technically if you have 3 or more sources that would be caught; NTP protocol was designed for that eventuality

> technically if you have 3 or more sources that would be caught; NTP protocol was designed for that eventuality Either go with one clock in your NTPd/Chrony configuration, or ≥4. Yes, if you have 3 they can triangulate, but if one goes offline now you have 2 with no tie-breaker. If you have (at least) 4 servers, then one can go away and triangulation / sanity-checking can still occur with the 3 remaining.

Your probably meant trilaterate.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#132

Post by lisper »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #103
Balgair wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many backup clocks/clusters that NIST uses as redundancies all around Boulder too, no need to even go up to Fort Collins. As in, NIST has fiber to a few at CU and a few commercial companies, last I checked. They're used in cases just like this one. Fun facts about The clock: You can't put anything in the room or take anything out. That's how sensitive the clock is. The room is just filled with asbestos. The…

>The actual port for the actual clock, the little metal thingy that is going buzz, buzz, buzz with voltage every second on the dot? Yeah, that little port isn't actually hooked up to anything, as again, it's so sensitive (impedance matching). So they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer to the rest of the world. Can you restate this part in full technical jargon along with more detail? I'm having…

These claims are bullshit. You can get technical details about the clock first-hand at this link:

https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-re...

and you can see a photo of the actual installation here:

https://www.denver7.com/news/front-range/boulder/new-atomic-...

As you can see, the room is clearly not filled with asbestos. Furthermore, the claim is absurd on its face. Asbestos was banned in the U.S. in March 2024 [1] and the clock was commissioned in May 2025.

The rest of the claims are equally questionable. For example:

> The actual port for the actual clock ... isn't actually hooked up to anything ... they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer

It's hard to make heads or tails of this, but if you read the technical description of the clock you will see that by the time you get to anything in the system that could reasonably be described as a "card" with "ports" you are so far from the business end of the clock that nothing you do could plausibly have an impact on its operation.

> You can't put anything in the room or take anything out. That's how sensitive the clock is.

This claim is also easily debunked using the formula for gravitational time dilation [2]. The accuracy of the clock is ~10^-16. Calculating the mass of an object 1m away from the clock that would produce this effect is left as an exercise, but it's a lot more than the mass of a human. To get a rough idea, the relativistic time dilation on the surface of the earth is ---

[1] https://www.mesotheliomahope.com/legal/legislation/asbestos-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation

[3] https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/3278.pdf

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#133

Post by sounds »

cornholio wrote: post #84
Maxion wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat interesting that they themselves don't have access to the site. You'd think there would have been some disaster plans put in place?

The disater plan is to have a few dozens stratum 1 servers spread around the world, each connected to a distinct primary atomic clock, so that a catastrophic disaster needs to take down the global internet itself for all servers to become unreachable. The failure of a single such server is far from a disaster.

For those of us near Boulder, it's urgent.

But the stratum 1 time servers can shrug and route around the damage.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#134

Post by zamadatix »

lisper wrote: post #132
Workaccount2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The actual port for the actual clock, the little metal thingy that is going buzz, buzz, buzz with voltage every second on the dot? Yeah, that little port isn't actually hooked up to anything, as again, it's so sensitive (impedance matching). So they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer to the rest of the world. Can you restate this part in full technical jargon along with more detail? I'm having…

These claims are bullshit. You can get technical details about the clock first-hand at this link: https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-re... and you can see a photo of the actual installation here: https://www.denver7.com/news/front-range/boulder/new-atomic-... As you can see, the room is clearly not filled with asbestos. Furthermore, the claim is absurd on its face. Asbestos was banned in the U.…

Agreed the stated claims don't seem to make much sense. Using a point mass 1 meter away and (G*M)/(r*c^2) I'm getting that you'd have to stand next to the clock for ~61 years to cause a time dilation due to gravity exceeding 10^-16 seconds.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#135

Post by OhMeadhbh »

joncrane wrote: post #120
jhart99 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NIST maintains several time standards. Gaithersburg MD is still up and I assume Hawaii is as well. Other than potential damage to equipment from loss of power (turbo molecular vacuum pumps and oil diffusion pumps might end up failing in interesting ways if not shut down properly) it will just take some time for the clocks to be recalibrated against the other NIST standards.

Gaithersburg went down on December 8th, is there confirmation that it's fully functional again?

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

Says it's still mostly up.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#136

Post by samch »

Can anybody speak to the current best practices around running underground power lines? I see these types of articles about above-ground distribution systems from time-to-time, particularly in California. I feel lucky that my area has underground power, but that was installed back in the 1980s. Would it be prohibitively expensive for Boulder’s utility provider to move to underground distribution? I can’t help but think it could be worth the cost to reduce wildfire risk and offer more reliable service.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#137

Post by vpribish »

autarch wrote: post #86
verzali wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh, here's the problem, I'm sort of stuck travelling into the future at a more or less constant rate. I don't know how to stop doing that...

Just go to your local shop and buy some time brakes. That's the safest course of action until this is repaired.

ugh. I have to replace my time rotors again - I thought regen was supposed to help with the wear while it improved range?

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#138

Post by OhMeadhbh »

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #34
guenthert wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 refere…

I think people have a wrong idea of what a modern atomic clock looks like. These are readily available commercially, Microchip for example will happily sell you hydrogen, cesium or rubidium atomic clocks. Hydrogen masers are rather unwieldy, but you can get a rubidium clock in a 1U format and cesium ones are not much bigger. I think their cesium freq standards are formerly a HP business they acquired. Example: https:…

Sure, but F2 is a bit more accurate: "As of February 2016 the IT-CsF2 cesium fountain clock started reporting a uB of 1.7 × 10−16 in the BIPM reports of evaluation of primary frequency standards." ( from https://web.archive.org/web/20220121090046/ftp://ftp2.bipm.o... )

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#139

Post by wat10000 »

wpm wrote: post #110
Maxious wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two other sites for the time.nist.gov service so it'll be okay. Probably more interesting is how you get a tier 0 site back in sync - NIST rents out these cyberpunk looking units you can use to get your local frequency standards up to scratch for ~$700/month https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/frequency-measurement...

I must have one of those units oh my god

It's like a toaster oven, but it toasts time.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#140

Post by cramcgrab »

cramcgrab wrote: post #95
sgnelson wrote: post #90

One question I have is did DOGE decisions have anything to do with this? Because I know they took knives to NIST.

Actually DOGE involvement at the highest level would have resulted in Tesla solar and Tesla powerwall battery backups.

Apparently no engineers here anymore, all armchair politicians.
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