Hello, I'm one of the engineers that worked on it. Feel free to ask me questions.
Can we telnet? Trying to telnet roughtime.cloudflare.com 2002 and getting nothing...
Cloudflare Time Services
41–50 of 68 posts
Re: Cloudflare Time Services
#42It seems to me that CloudFlare should just sponsor servers for inclusion in the long-standing global NTP pools. https://www.ntppool.org/en/
CloudFlare is against anything open source. They seem like they are a nice sharing company but think again. They like Amazon are Open source thieves.
Re: Cloudflare Time Services
#43Re: Cloudflare Time Services
#44Personally, I don't trust Cloudflare. There's just something a bit shady about a company that defends web sites which pretend to have Adobe Flash updaters or pretend to be bankofamerica.com as free speech. That said, I don't imagine they could screw up NTP too badly, except, of course, logging and tracking users. I hope they don't smear leap seconds like Google, or do any of a number of other dumb things simply becau…
No idea why your comment got flagged. You made a legit point here. CloudFlare is a highly over rated service that shouldn't be trusted.
Not to mention their bait-and-switch billing practice should be the only thing anyone is talking about when it comes to CloudFlare.
Re: Cloudflare Time Services
#45Are the local time servers stratum 1, or do they have some central stratum 1 source that they then distribute out to the edge datacenters? What's the value over just building your own stratum 1 source? (Shameless plug: https://github.com/jrockway/beaglebone-gps-clock/blob/master... )
Its actually not clear what you'd get. So I set it up on a server, and it shows as Stratum 3. So that means Cloudflare's service is a Stratum 2. I'd much prefer if they were a 1 and the servers would get a 2, but I guess for free that's what you get. The advantage for this is if you are running servers in production, this is easier to set up.
Getting authentication set up with stratum 1 provides was an involved process. I don't think any fax machines were involved but we came pretty close. Also many stratum 1 servers have rules on who can use them, so finding ones can be tricky.
Re: Cloudflare Time Services
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disgusting that supposed "hackers" and experts on hackernews advocate for single point of failures in the internet infrastructure. The internet is supposed to be distributed. If the NTP pool admins go nuts, have a fight etc, I'm glad there is an alternative. You can generally specify multiple sources, this would be a new source. And it's always the BS "they're evil" argument - when the posters contribute nothing them…
Isn't the whole point of the NTP pool that there isn't a single point of failure? (Assuming of course you're using multiple servers from the pool.)
In a technical sense, yes. But privateSFacct is referring to non-technical single points of failure.
Another example would be governmental capture of some chunk of the current NTP admins or something.
An organization, by its nature, is vulnerable to some potential single point of failure. Low probability, sure, but having a competing organization ready to step in can actually help keep that probability low by keeping the focus on.
Re: Cloudflare Time Services
#47It seems to me that CloudFlare should just sponsor servers for inclusion in the long-standing global NTP pools. https://www.ntppool.org/en/
CloudFlare is against anything open source. They seem like they are a nice sharing company but think again. They like Amazon are Open source thieves.
While I think your conclusion is a little strong, it is fair to say they're trying their hardest to legitimize by becoming entangled into almost every possible piece of infrastructure around.
As far as giant databases in the sky are concerned, in my book Cloudflare joined the same category as Google a long time ago. I don't like them because they've become another data-aggregating SPOF anyone with sense should actively avoid depending on
Re: Cloudflare Time Services
#48Re: Cloudflare Time Services
#49It seems to me that CloudFlare should just sponsor servers for inclusion in the long-standing global NTP pools. https://www.ntppool.org/en/
CloudFlare is against anything open source. They seem like they are a nice sharing company but think again. They like Amazon are Open source thieves.
This is bullshit and untrue.
We contribute back our changes to open source all the time via https://cloudflare.github.io/. We upstream where people will take our changes. We directly pay open source developers (take a look at all the money we paid to Mike Pall for LuaJIT) and employ/employed people working on open source projects (e.g. OpenResty).
Over years we've been contributing and explaining how we operate and open sourcing the relevant code (just look at the series of blogs by Marek Majkowski and others talking about how we fight DDoS and open sourcing the tooling).
Re: Cloudflare Time Services
#50It seems to me that CloudFlare should just sponsor servers for inclusion in the long-standing global NTP pools. https://www.ntppool.org/en/
CloudFlare is against anything open source. They seem like they are a nice sharing company but think again. They like Amazon are Open source thieves.
Even if they don't contribute anything, I'm sure they comply with the license. The software author should've thought twice about the license they use. They will only be thieves if they don't comply with the license.
This could be either software authors mistaking non-copyleft for copyleft, or unrealistic expectations about how companies, and capitalism works.