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Question for people who read the link- Do you like the writing style and inclusion of gifs?
I rarely (~5%) find pictures of any sort improve the understanding, even in "mainstream" news sources.
1. 70 GBP/hr seemed like a low rate for a consultant (what’s an electrician or a plumber cost on a subscription contract?). I’m glad author doubled it. What happened to NetThing’s customers after they ceased trading? Who took over the lighting management of the car parks etc. ?
In conversation with the software eng it was implied that they intended to send someone on site to each of over 500 sites to reimage the devices. That must have cost them way more than £70/month and the way that after ~10 months the number of devices actually went up to over 1,000 suggests they were happy to just keep paying.
The thing is, it was essentially no work. All I did was remove a firewall rule. I had to run NTP anyway for my regular customers. Initially more time was spent just in email back and forth and honestly I was enjoying that.
Because of it being basically no work, I had a moral problem with trying to find the absolute highest amount of money they would bear.
I know that is wrong and it does me no good, but I couldn't get past it.
What did annoy me was their inability to pay bills on time, and time I spent chasing invoices and creating custom late payment paperwork that is never relevant for my usual customers.
That was the main impetus for doubling the rate, and despite me jokingly suggesting that their product was not good enough to be profitable (I have no real data on that either way) I suspect they had much bigger organisational problems to be consistently paying late and ending up insolvent.
Interesting subject - but I found myself pretty quickly lost in the technica terms. I do not even know what an NTP server is.
In short, if you are ever going to make an embedded device, or an operating system distribution, or anything with NTP default on, please make sure, 1. NEVER, ever hardcode an individual NTP server (in form of a IP or domain). DO NOT just go to a list of NTP servers, then copy a few into your code. DON'T ping pool.ntp.org and get its IP address written down. DON'T DO ANY OF THESE! PLEASE! 2. DO NOT use Stratum 0 and S…
On the one hand, I completely appreciate this. When I set up NTP, I'm careful to think through consequences and tread lightly. After all, I learned my sysadmin skills at a university before the September that Never Ended, so it really was a collegial place back then. On the the other hand, the internet is a much bigger place. Things are orders of magnitude more complex. The feedback loops that made NTP work well in a…
Also, I think NTP needs more publicity. We need people to be aware of it before we could get feedback. The community then can have a watchdog team that spots misuses and publishes alerts.
I'm trying to coin "Postel decentralisation" for things like this: people assume NTP is a distributed robust system, but in practice it turns out to be run by one very overwhelmed guy in a basement somewhere. (It could have been set up properly to be distributed here, but they didn't do it)
However, people just go to a list of NTP servers, then copy a few into the code, instead of using the distributed pool. Then it's not a surprise that the NTP in a product is going to stop working, meanwhile a one very overwhelmed guy who happened to run one of the server is going to have serious troubles, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753835.
Interesting subject - but I found myself pretty quickly lost in the technica terms. I do not even know what an NTP server is.
I do agree the article could have been much improved by adding a sentence that defined what an NTP server was upfront.
If you're stepping in on somebody's semi-public journal, it's probably incumbent upon the reader to do their spadework if they care.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that was really the main problem in this case. Hardcoding any address (DNS or IP) that you do not control is always a horrible idea.
Does anyone really control their IP addresses? I thought that ultimately those were controlled by ARIN, RIPE, et.al.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone really control their IP addresses? I thought that ultimately those were controlled by ARIN, RIPE, et.al.
If you have your own dedicated IP range and you are advertising routes correctly, then you're as close to ownership of your IP addresses as Google or Facebook are of theirs. ARIN and RIPE control allocations, but do not control routing to allocated ranges.