What are people doing about this? Is anyone planning to blanket whitelist UDP/123 like most residential ISPs currently do for SMTP? Port scanning their customers pre-emptively to see who's vulnerable? Keeping an eye on rate shapers to see odd bursts in upload speed?


On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Simon Lyall <simon@darkmere.gen.nz> wrote:
On Wed, 12 Feb 2014, Don Stokes wrote:
As I think about this, I'm starting to regard NTP pools as an attractive
nuisance - the simplicity of using the pools (and the increasing use of
them in preconfigured devices) means that an important service is being
provided on unstable systems, often run by amateur operators on a grace
and favour basis. That does not bode well for the general stability of
applications that require good time.

Compared to 10 years ago before the pool.ntp.prg got setup the situation is a lot better. OS vendors provide their own time servers or use the pool while end user devices often get a local server via DHCP. Before then people either didn't have time sync'd or manually configured it with all sorts of problems.

Whatever you provide is going to have to be zero-configuration for 99% of end users, which effectively means getting the settings to the DSL modems which use DHCP to get it to network devices.

If ISPs can do this reliably then fair enough we will see a drop in usage of pool.ntp.org , but it has to be reliable or we'll end up like the DNS with people manually configuring 8.8.8.8 to get around "ISP X's dodgy DNS servers" .

--
Simon Lyall �| �Very Busy �| �Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.


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