The pool.ntp.org project is a big virtual cluster of timeservers providing reliable easy to use NTP service for millions of clients.
The pool is being used by millions or tens of millions of systems around the world. It's the default "time server" for most of the major Linux distributions and many networked appliances (see information for vendors).
Because of the large number of users we are in need of more servers. If you have a server with a static IP address always available on the internet, please considering adding it to the system.
The project is maintained and developed by Ask Bjørn Hansen and a great group of contributors on the mailing lists. The code is available.
Hosting and bandwidth for the "hub" servers are currently provided by Develooper, Phyber Communications and YellowBot.
go upThe NTP Pool "backend systems" are moving racks at Phyber. To minimize the risk of things going wrong we're doing it the old-fashioned simple way of turning everything off, moving it and turning it on again. It will mean about an hour where servers are not monitored and we can't add new ones or access the www.pool.ntp.org site.
In the new rack there'll be more power available so when the move is done we'll have more capacity.
Over the last couple of months we had a couple of the "central servers" fail. It hasn't caused any service outage for the NTP clients, but some of you might have noticed that the manage NTP Pool site has been sluggish at times.
A few months ago I bought a few new servers and sent them down to our friends at Phyber Communications who wired them up in their hosting facility. Over the last weeks I've added puppet declarations) to configure them and since earlier this evening they're in production for the web sites and a few other services.
I have a long road map for the NTP Pool system and many of the items involve processing and storing more data to make our system better. The new servers are going to be helpful for that.
My other project for the months have been upgrades to the GeoDNS server to support EDNS-CLIENT-SUBNET. It has been live for users of Google DNS for a while. We're still working out some kinks with the OpenDNS folks to get it fully enabled there.
Over the last month the NTP Pool has gotten the biggest upgrade it has had in years. The changes has given us much more scalability and performance.
As you might know, the NTP Pool system is essentially a monitoring system and a smart DNS server. Server operators register their server in the system, the monitoring system checks and evaluates the submitted servers and the DNS server gives end-users a (hopefully) local selection of servers, weighted by preferences given by the server operator and other factors.
Last month there was a big change to the DNS server.
For years the geodns server has had a misconfiguration so users in Great Britain by default (accessing the non-country-code domain) would get a European server rather than a more local one.
The zone in the NTP Pool system has always been called ‘uk’, but the GeoIP library returns ‘gb’ for the relevant users. Oops! The system didn’t have a ‘gb’ zone configured, but knew it was in Europe so would fall back to that.
I fixed it about 3 weeks ago, so since then users in that region should be getting better service.
Related then servers registered in the ‘uk’ zone will have seen their traffic go up considerably. If you need to adjust how much traffic your server gets, you can adjust the netspeed on the manage site.
To safely upgrade some of the DNS configuration infrastructure updates to the DNS data will be suspended for 20-45 minutes. Some parts of the website might also return errors while everything is being updated.
For end-users of the pool there should be no interruption.
Update Maintenance was completed in 20 minutes. The changes were in part to get ready to deploy a new Go based DNS server to replace the current DNS server.
