News items for tag time - Koos van den Hout

Wrote a bit on how I configured FreeBSD as a PPS slave.

Speaking of FreeBSD and ntp: yesterday at work I set up a Dell Poweredge 2550 as ntp server. FreeBSD 5.4, a kernel with PPS support (the PPS bits will arrive when I have time to make a cable). It now runs over the weekend to see how stable ntpd will get.

Another problem with a public NTP server: Poul-Henning Kamp runs an NTP server on the Danish internet exchange DIX. He found out D-link routers all hammer on that NTP server (and lots of others) without any prior agreement. Read his Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism and Richard Clayton's write-up on how he researched the problem and found the source in the D-Link equipment. NTP was one of the last services that you could run cooperatively and assume your clients would play nice, now with 'home broadband routers' everywhere out in the world who like to keep the right time (and use sloppy-programmed client software to get that time), this trust in cooperative clients has been broken several times. Yes, this looks a lot like the former case with the University of Wisconsin - Madison and Netgear routers. At least, that case was solved with a good fix and an apology from Netgear.

I watched the leap second on my rikaline gps and .. nothing happened. It just jumps from 2005-12-31 23:59:59 UTC to 2006-01-01 00:00:00 with nothing in between. Other sources did show a real leap second or an adjustment after the fact.

Yes, Windows can be educated to accept the onboard clock in UTC. It's just not documented (duh). But Casper Dik has the answer: how to set solaris and windows to have the onboard rtc in UTC.

I bundled the scripts I use to collect ntp stats in mrtg so other people can enjoy them too.