Introduction

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.

News

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• November 10, 2011

  Website updates and translations

  As announced some days ago on the pool-dev mailing list, yesterday I moved the "manage your server" section to a separate site. This helps keep the main site fast and made it easier to make all connections to that site encrypted.

  Today the NTP Pool site got some changes to run better and faster. In the process there was 10 minutes of downtime late Tuesday (pacific time) and through much of the day Wednesday some pages might have loaded in a language that wasn't your usual preference.

  Speaking of languages, the website can (always) use help with translations. On the beta site I enabled some of the partially translated languages to show up. Japanese was just added there today thanks to Taro Yoshimoto.

  Translations of languages not on the list at all are of course also welcome.

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• June 9, 2011

  Continuing IPv6 deployment

  World IPv6 Day is over, but we'll continue to serve AAAA (IPv6) records for 2.pool.ntp.org (and 2.europe, 2.fedora, 2.debian, etc).

  So far no problems have been reported, even the servers going through IPv6 tunnels seem to work fine.

  We already have almost 200 IPv6 servers in the pool; though that's less than 10% of all the pool servers and they're mostly in a handful of countries versus the wide deployment we have for IPv4.

  The pool system is tracking, but not yet showing separate stats for IPv6 servers by default. (You can however "hack" the graph URLs to show them by adding -v6 to the file name, for example the European counts.

  Below is the graph for the total number of IPv6 servers in the pool.

  

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• June 7, 2011

  Monitoring of some servers temporarily suspended

  While the system is rebuilding some internal statistics, monitoring of some of the IPv4 servers in the pool have been suspended. They'll be reactivated in about 6 hours. All servers with IDs below 8500 are being monitored again after a break of a couple of hours.

  In addition all IPv6 servers are being monitored now and are slowly increasing their scores for inclusion in the "2." pool!

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• June 7, 2011

  Experimentally enabling IPv6

  If you are following the pool mailing lists you'll have seen that the last days have carried a flurry of activity as new code for IPv6 support (and distributed monitoring) has been tested on the "beta pool" site.

  June 8th is World IPv6 Day where many sites small and big will enable the IPv6 protocol for the day to help test everyones IPv6 readiness.

  Here at the NTP pool we are today enabling monitoring of IPv6 servers; and over the next 12 hours we will start in a limited fashion to serve AAAA (IPv6) DNS records to clients asking for them. Right now the pool site is enjoying a brief break while the new code and database updates are being deployed.

  For now this will only be on the "2.pool.ntp.org" zone; but unlike Google, Facebook and most other sites we are not planning to turn this off again on June 9th.

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• May 30, 2011

  Brief web outage

  One of the database replicas had some corruption; so I took down the primary database briefly to run some consistency checks there, too. This is taking down the NTP Pool website and delaying some of the monitoring.

  Everything will be back shortly.

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• Older news...

Links

• NTP home - the website about ntp
• Meinberg, makers of incredibly fine time server systems.
• The Public servers abuse and the Fixing the NTP server abuse problem threads on the comp.protocols.time.ntp newsgroup have caused this project to be started.
• Federico Sevilla III also has a mailing list archive of the timekeepers list - this one is searchable.