I wish when accepting donations, websites would stop caching the total collected amount or give it a super short TTL. I like to see the little progress bar get closer to the goal thanks to my couple of bucks.
So we have NTP begging to raise a grand yet we have hundreds of billions being spent on AI data centers.
NTP might not be able to generate AI cat videos full of hallucinations but it is a vital part of web infrastructure. The same can't be said about today's mega projects.
Absolutely shameful that this project - and many, many others that underpin trillion-dollar tech company valuations - aren’t fully funded already by the major consumers.
I’d like to see more projects do a breakdown of total yearly costs (including contributor compensation!), how much existing sponsorships from companies actually cover, and what number they’d need to operate properly (with full-time, paid contributors).
Something like money to the endowment from the big corp, then would be recipients petition the endowment for ongoing funding, some board decides based on a set of open protocols...
Because honestly I've seen this a bit recently - major infrastructure projects looking for effectively pocket change; a couple thousand.
They shouldn't ever have to beg for money, this is stupid.
Rather than money one can donate NTP servers to the pool. [1] It can be a fun learning exercise in setting up a stable stratum-2 time server. One can create graphs from the optional logs.
Why bother? Many of the rabbit holes one could venture down in learning to set up a stable time server can also benefit application servers in terms of latency, responsiveness, learning how to get clients to share resources and so much more. Rather than trying to find cooperative stratum-1 servers, one can start by using each of the Google, Facebook and Apple public stratum-1 servers [2] to get started. They get beat up a lot but most of them are stable most of the time.
Ask your favorite LLM how to set up a public NTP server using NTPD or Chrony. For extra credit play with each of them.
One of the really nifty things about having a stratum-1 time server on-site (because... reasons) is those graphs. You can very readily see the subtle temperature-dependence of timing crystals. At the facility I was at there was a large cycle every day during the week and then smaller cycle on each weekend day. Our HVAC system didn't heat/cool the building as much on the weekend when no one was there so the temperature swing -> frequency swing was smaller.
Really drives home one of my favourite half-jokes: every sensor is a temperature sensor; some of them measure other things too.
We ran a public NTP server for many years. Then, details hazy, but I think there was a UDP amplification vulnerability that was exploited which upset our transit provider so we took it down. Might be fun to try again though.
Yep, I encourage everyone to do this (though don't ask an LLM, actually put effort into learning). It's easy and cheap to do. I have been running a server in the NTP pool on a Digital Ocean droplet for years now, costs me only $6 a month.
The domain ntp.org is a very visible one, why not add a "Donors" page and say everyone who donates 250+ gets to show their company name as a sponsor on that page?
This usually gets the attention of corporates and makes it easy to make the case internally as well, they all love to sponsor!
As someone working on an NTP implementation (specifically ntpd-rs) I have to add some context to this: I do believe that donating to the Network Time Foundation is fine, but it is not required to keep the Network Time Protocol up in any way.
Firstly, the most important reason the ntp.org domain name is so well known is because of the NTP pool, which is an entirely separate project (the Network Time Foundation calls it an associated project), which was allowed to use the `pool.ntp.org` domain name, but does not directly receive significant funding from the Network Time Foundation as far as I understand (I do not know the details of the domain name arrangement). That pool project was developed independently of the Network Time Foundation and is run by a different group of volunteers, mostly being developed and maintained by Ask Bjørn Hansen and hosting servers entirely consisting of (sometimes professional) volunteer operators. This is what many NTP implementations, specifically many Linux distributions, use as their standard source of time. But it does not appear to depend much on the Network Time Foundation for continued existence.
Secondly, despite all the claims made on the Network Time Foundation site, the IETF took over development and maintenance of the NTP protocol for something like two decades now already under the NTP working group. This was all done with the Network Time Foundation fully agreeing this was the way forward. But for some reason they still consider themselves exempted from any process that the IETF uses and consider themselves as the true developers of the protocol. They constantly frustrate the processes that the IETF uses, claiming that they should receive special treatment as being the 'reference implementation'. Meanwhile, the IETF NTP WG does not have a concept of the reference implementation at all, instead considering all NTP implementations equal.
Aside from this frustrating stance, the Network Time Foundation also didn't do much work on trying to forward the standard at all, instead relying on the status quo from the late 90s and early 2000s. Meanwhile the IETF NTP WG worked on standardizing a way to secure NTP traffic (with regular NTP traffic being relatively easy to man in the middle, with older implementations even being so predictable that faking responses didn't even need reading the requests). That much more secure standard, NTS, was fully standardized in September of 2020, but the Network Time Foundation continues to not implement this standard. All of this has resulted in almost every Linux distribution that I know of replacing their ntpd implementation with NTPsec (with ntpd not even being available as an alternative anymore for installation).
Meanwhile people also started working on NTPv5, in order to remove some of the unsafe and badly defined parts of the standard, and in general bring the spec back up to date. As part of this process, it was decided some time ago that in contrast to the previous NTP standards, the algorithms specifying what a client should do in order to synchronize the time should be removed from the standard (the algorithms specified in the previous standards were not being used by any implementation, not even the ntpd implementation by the Network Time Foundation itself). NTPv5 instead focuses on the wire format of NTP packets and the simple interactions between parties. Yet despite there having been a consensus call on this, and despite no current implementation following the exact algorithm as specified in NTPv4, the Network Time Foundation continues to frustrate the process by claiming that these algorithms are an essential part of the standard.
All of this frustration was also a large part of why the PTP protocol was eventually developed at the IEEE. That is to say: even though the operating mode of PTP is often quite different to that of NTP these days, the information that needs to be transferred is essentially the same, and the packets could have trivially been defined to be the same as long as NTP had built in a li...
Honestly the XSLT mocking and bad faith arguments have convinced me as an individual I shouldn’t care about technologies so much. If NTP is so important, one of the billion dollar corpos can foot the bill since they know best about what is valuable.
This was submitted with a title that doesn’t match the page and is not even accurste (Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up) is not correct. This donation page is not for the public NTP pool. It’s for the NTP Project organization and their web page.
All of the angry comments from people who think NTP will stop working if the donation bar doesn’t get to $1000 are misinformed. Also note that the bar isn’t updating. It’s been stuck at $365 for myself and others despite donations coming in.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 68.9 ms ] thread> 1 error prohibited this submission from being saved:
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Good to know.
Are these goals monthly goals, with the counter being reset? The sites don’t make that clear.
I submitted a request for commercial use via their online form but never received a response.
NTP might not be able to generate AI cat videos full of hallucinations but it is a vital part of web infrastructure. The same can't be said about today's mega projects.
What I Mean:
Reference .gov atomic clock (not radium one) -> NTP -> ? -> ? -> satellite control station -> gps -> PTP
Hahaha
There was a fork to clean up and secure the implementation: https://ntpsec.org and ideally they would combine forces.
Summarized here: https://lwn.net/Articles/713901
I donated an amount but the bar didn't move and is at the same level($395) as before my donation
I’d like to see more projects do a breakdown of total yearly costs (including contributor compensation!), how much existing sponsorships from companies actually cover, and what number they’d need to operate properly (with full-time, paid contributors).
Let it fail and see what happens.
Something like money to the endowment from the big corp, then would be recipients petition the endowment for ongoing funding, some board decides based on a set of open protocols...
Because honestly I've seen this a bit recently - major infrastructure projects looking for effectively pocket change; a couple thousand.
They shouldn't ever have to beg for money, this is stupid.
and still, I'd never put it past them to figure out something that I haven't.
I reflexively donate a little to things like this and I think everyone else should to.
Why bother? Many of the rabbit holes one could venture down in learning to set up a stable time server can also benefit application servers in terms of latency, responsiveness, learning how to get clients to share resources and so much more. Rather than trying to find cooperative stratum-1 servers, one can start by using each of the Google, Facebook and Apple public stratum-1 servers [2] to get started. They get beat up a lot but most of them are stable most of the time.
Ask your favorite LLM how to set up a public NTP server using NTPD or Chrony. For extra credit play with each of them.
[1] - https://www.ntppool.org/en/join.html
[2] - # grep -E "facebo|goog|appl" /etc/hosts
Really drives home one of my favourite half-jokes: every sensor is a temperature sensor; some of them measure other things too.
Firstly, the most important reason the ntp.org domain name is so well known is because of the NTP pool, which is an entirely separate project (the Network Time Foundation calls it an associated project), which was allowed to use the `pool.ntp.org` domain name, but does not directly receive significant funding from the Network Time Foundation as far as I understand (I do not know the details of the domain name arrangement). That pool project was developed independently of the Network Time Foundation and is run by a different group of volunteers, mostly being developed and maintained by Ask Bjørn Hansen and hosting servers entirely consisting of (sometimes professional) volunteer operators. This is what many NTP implementations, specifically many Linux distributions, use as their standard source of time. But it does not appear to depend much on the Network Time Foundation for continued existence.
Secondly, despite all the claims made on the Network Time Foundation site, the IETF took over development and maintenance of the NTP protocol for something like two decades now already under the NTP working group. This was all done with the Network Time Foundation fully agreeing this was the way forward. But for some reason they still consider themselves exempted from any process that the IETF uses and consider themselves as the true developers of the protocol. They constantly frustrate the processes that the IETF uses, claiming that they should receive special treatment as being the 'reference implementation'. Meanwhile, the IETF NTP WG does not have a concept of the reference implementation at all, instead considering all NTP implementations equal.
Aside from this frustrating stance, the Network Time Foundation also didn't do much work on trying to forward the standard at all, instead relying on the status quo from the late 90s and early 2000s. Meanwhile the IETF NTP WG worked on standardizing a way to secure NTP traffic (with regular NTP traffic being relatively easy to man in the middle, with older implementations even being so predictable that faking responses didn't even need reading the requests). That much more secure standard, NTS, was fully standardized in September of 2020, but the Network Time Foundation continues to not implement this standard. All of this has resulted in almost every Linux distribution that I know of replacing their ntpd implementation with NTPsec (with ntpd not even being available as an alternative anymore for installation).
Meanwhile people also started working on NTPv5, in order to remove some of the unsafe and badly defined parts of the standard, and in general bring the spec back up to date. As part of this process, it was decided some time ago that in contrast to the previous NTP standards, the algorithms specifying what a client should do in order to synchronize the time should be removed from the standard (the algorithms specified in the previous standards were not being used by any implementation, not even the ntpd implementation by the Network Time Foundation itself). NTPv5 instead focuses on the wire format of NTP packets and the simple interactions between parties. Yet despite there having been a consensus call on this, and despite no current implementation following the exact algorithm as specified in NTPv4, the Network Time Foundation continues to frustrate the process by claiming that these algorithms are an essential part of the standard.
All of this frustration was also a large part of why the PTP protocol was eventually developed at the IEEE. That is to say: even though the operating mode of PTP is often quite different to that of NTP these days, the information that needs to be transferred is essentially the same, and the packets could have trivially been defined to be the same as long as NTP had built in a li...
https://github.com/sponsors/nwtime
All of the angry comments from people who think NTP will stop working if the donation bar doesn’t get to $1000 are misinformed. Also note that the bar isn’t updating. It’s been stuck at $365 for myself and others despite donations coming in.