pool.ntp.org


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

Introduction

Active Servers

As of 2008-08-20

The pool.ntp.org project is a big virtual cluster of timeservers striving to provide reliable easy to use NTP service for millions of clients without putting a strain on the big popular timeservers.

Adrian von Bidder created this project after a discussion about resource consumption on the big timeservers, with the idea that for everyday use a DNS round robin would be good enough, and would allow spreading the load over many servers. The disadvantage is, of course, that you may occasionally get a bad server and that you usually won't get the server closest to you. The workarounds for this is respectively to make sure you configure at least three servers in your ntp.conf and to use the country zones (for example 0.us.pool.ntp.org) rather than the global zone (for example 0.pool.ntp.org). Read more on using the pool.

The pool is now enormously popular, being used by millions of systems around the world. It's the default "time server" for most of the major Linux distributions (see information for vendors).

The pool project has since 2005 been maintained by Ask Bjørn Hansen, Develooper and a great group of contributors on the mailing lists.

go up

News

 Subscribe in a reader

  • 2008-05-15

    NTP Pool on ohloh.net

    Most people don't know, but the NTP Pool web site and monitoring software is actually licensed under the Apache Software License 2.0.

    I did that to make it easier if at some point the community decides that my stewardship of the NTP Pool isn't good enough. Since installing the pool site doesn't make much sense other than for development I don't make ordinary releases, but all the code is available in my public subversion repository.

    On a somewhat related note the project has an entry on ohloh. If you are an open source contributor and haven't seen that site before, you should give it a look.

    | Comments (0)
  • 2008-05-13

    NTP Pool in your language

    I've been adding support to the NTP Pool site for translations again.

    Before I took over the site it was translated in a bunch of languages, but as the site got dynamic features and more pages we lost that. Now it's back!

    If you are interested in helping then send me a mail at ask@develooper.com. Experience with gettext (".po") files or Locale::Maketext lexicons and with version control (Subversion specifically) will be helpful, but if you are willing to learn then it isn't required.

    | Comments (0)
  • 2008-04-25

    Sub-optimal monitoring performance

    Early this morning (PST) we had a few hours of "sub-optimal" performance on the monitoring server. A hundred servers or so were marked "bad" and got unnecessary warning mails because of it. users of the pool should not have been impacted. Work is in progress to permanently improve on this.

    | Comments (0)
  • 2007-12-29

    Outage yesterday

    We were upgrading the servers that the pool web site is running on yesterday and had an outage for a few hours. It should all be back to normal now.

    The upgrade was (mostly) about getting all our servers up from RHEL 3 to version 5 (before we had mostly RHEL3 boxes and a few with 4 and 5 ...). Now when they are all the same it's easier for us to manage the configuration across all the boxes and soon we'll have some more high availability things setup for the pool system. Long term the goal is to get more of the infrastructure completely distributed, but the website (for showing stats etc) will likely still be in just one place.

    | Comments (4)
  • 2007-10-18

    Plan for IPv6 Support

    A relatively frequent question I get is "when will the pool support IP v6".

    It's on the "road map", but not too high up on the list. Months ago I wrote up the current plans on the NTP Pool wiki.

    Speaking of the wiki - eventually I'll get that moved over to the NTP Public Services Wiki.

    | Comments (0)
  • 2007-10-02

    The Pool is 100% on the new DNS system

    With some assistance of Guillaume Filion the fifth pool.ntp.org is now running the new DNS software, too. It's located in Germany. We have a few more servers offered by volunteers ready to be setup and we'll work on that over the next week or so and then we'll experiment with how best to use them to get the best possible performance for the pool users.

    The difference is that now pool operators shouldn't see "spikes" in traffic, unless a big ISP caches the DNS entry and gives it out to many many many clients. If that happens we'll experiment with adjusting the TTL of the served records (The "TTL" is the time-to-live, the time the data should be cached by the end-user nameserver).

    | Comments (0)
  • 2007-09-28

    DNS status

    We deployed the new DNS system to 4 out of the 5 pool.ntp.org nameservers. We have several new systems that volunteers have offered ready to be setup, but no time to configure and test them yet. Hopefully it will be done within a week or so...

    There's a description of the new system on the DNS page on the wiki.

    We've noticed an issue with the new system that it seems too eager to send traffic to the high bandwidth systems rather than the low-bandwidth ones. I am looking into it, although not with too much urgency as none of the high-bandwidth server operators have gotten more traffic than they can handle.

    | Comments (0)
  • 2007-09-26

    More Meinberg equipment donated!

    On hearing how many people had sent in applications for the equipment giveaway our friends at Meinberg offered us some more equipment!

    For diversity from the GPS units the extra 3 systems will be DCF77 cards (PCI or PCI-Express).

    Since DCF77 only works in Europe we're planning to give them out there and then pick hosts in the rest of the world for the GPS units.

    Also - in particular one of the locations having offered to host the LANTIME server is ideal as a future home for the pool system in general, so the LANTIME (also donated by Meinberg) that I'm currently using will also be sent out (location to be determined).

    | Comments (0)
  • 2007-09-26

    NTP Pool Weblog

    I've setup a weblog for posting news about the NTP Pool project. This will be much nicer and hopefully make it easier to get slightly more frequent updates. The old process had me updating the list of news by editing HTML on the site (or rather, edit in my development copy, commit to subversion and then run the deployment to the site).

    I've "imported" all the old news into the weblog and soon I will update the main site so it pulls the recent news automatically.

    | Comments (0)
  • 2007-09-06

    Big news: Meinberg giveaway, new pool site

    Three awesome news items today:

    1: We're announcing the great Meinberg GPS time equipment giveaway. Over the next months we're (thanks to Meinberg) giving away thousands of dollars worth of high quality time-keeping devices.

    2: We got a brand new design and layout on the pool site! Many more updates are coming.

    3: The pool is the default ntp service in several of the big Linux distributions (Fedora, Debian, RHEL, CentOS and many more). For this reason we really really need more servers to help with the traffic. Hopefully the equipment giveaway will help on this. Please mention it in your weblog or wherever else appropriate.

    On a related sidenote we've started alpha-testing a new system for distributing traffic to the servers more evenly and with much less "spikes" in the traffic.

    | Comments (0)
  • Older news...

Links

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