pool.ntp.org


pool.ntp.org: public ntp time server for everyone

Introduction

Active Servers

As of 2010-08-01

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.

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News

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  • May 9, 2010

    Mailing lists are moving

    Adrian von Bidder has generously hosted and maintained the mailing lists since he started the project 7 years ago and it's time for the lists to move. In the next few days the lists will move from fortytwo.ch to lists.ntp.org.

    The 'timekeepers', 'i18n' and 'dev' lists will be moved over; but the announcements list will be discontinued since de-facto the news.ntppool.org site is where the announcements are. You can subscribe either with the Atom feed or via Feedburner's email feature at the mailing list page.

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  • April 25, 2010

    Routing trouble at the NTP Pool monitoring server

    Since Saturday morning the NTP Pool server have had trouble routing to some servers in the pool system (about 5%). This was too few to trigger the "help help, something's wrong!" alerts; so thanks to those of you who sent in tickets!

    I opened a support with our provider and hopefully the issue will be resolved shortly.

    The monitoring server is on the same network as www.pool.ntp.org (in AS 7012) if you have trouble and want to check traceroutes or BGP information from your end.

    Due to the distributed nature of the pool system, time serving for clients should not be affected.

    Update - One of the "upstream" providers were dropping a seemingly random group of networks. Phyber took down the BGP session to them until it's sorted and all is well again as of around 5pm pacific time.

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  • November 13, 2009

    www.pool.ntp.org is ipv6 enabled

    If you are IPv6 connected, the www.pool.ntp.org site will now be delivered to you via IPv6.

    I did tests on a hundred thousand visitors to the site and nobody who could connect with IPv4 had trouble talking to a site with both "AAAA" and "A" records. The test only included users with javascript however, so it could still miss appliances, older boxes etc. More tests are needed to make the pool.ntp.org service "ipv6 enabled".

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  • October 17, 2009

    NTP Pool website available via IPv6

    In our ongoing process of getting the NTP Pool IPv6 compatible we took a first (small!) step getting the website partially available via IPv6. For now it's via an IPv6-only hostname: www6.ntppool.org.

    So far the anecdotal reports are that it's working fine for people with IPv6. The next tests will be to see how connectivity is affected for everyone else if a host has both AAAA (IPv6) and A (IPv4) records in DNS.

    As part of the same change, the website is now served through Varnish which makes it a bit faster and more importantly makes it inconsequential when people rudely try to "sync time" via HTTP to the server.

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  • September 28, 2009

    New pool zones: Venezuela, Serbia, Croatia, El Salvador, Costa Rica and

    The pool keeps growing (although we still need more servers).

    Recently we've added zones and servers in Costa Rica, Venezuela, Serbia, Croatia, El Salvador and New Caledonia.

    But we need more servers all over the world. In smaller developing countries internet use is picking up and local servers will help. In bigger countries usage is also growing faster than the number of servers; so extra help is needed. We're getting close to 2000 [active servers] - but for millions and millions of users we need more.

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Links

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Comments and questions to Ask Bjørn Hansen — ask@develooper.com