NTP Pool News

New and better graphs using D3.js

2012-02-20T06:17:43Z

Today I updated the graphs from being generated by rrdtool to be generated with Javascript and SVG using the wonderful d3.js library. You can see an example of the new graphs or if you have a server in the pool you can use the new graphs.

There are a lot of things I wanted to do that using RRD made hard. Splitting the central parts of the system across more servers than the 2-3 it's running on now. Supporting multiple monitoring nodes. More interactive graphs. Showing historical data. Etcetera.

None of it impossible with RRDtool or for example it's cousin graphite, but those tools really just aren't a good match for our needs here.

The update today is just the beginning. Over on the "beta pool" we're already running with multiple monitors and on my development system I'll soon add some more features to the graphs so you can see the details of individual data points, go back in time a bit and so on. There are also a number of places on the site still where the old graphs are used even if your browser does support SVG.

I know many of you are using the old graphs on your own websites, ops charts, startpages and so on, and I intent do continue to maintain them at the current level for as long as possible. They're also supposed to show if you visit with a browser without Javascript and SVG support.

When the features and API have stabilized a bit, I'll also make a widget so you can put the D3 graphs on other sites and document the JSON API so you can use it to extract the data similar to the current CSV option.

Website updates and translations

2011-11-10T08:18:37Z

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.

Continuing IPv6 deployment

2011-06-09T00:36:32Z

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.

Monitoring of some servers temporarily suspended

2011-06-07T08:10:25Z

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!

Experimentally enabling IPv6

2011-06-07T05:40:52Z

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.

Brief web outage

2011-05-30T02:49:17Z

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.

New web server on the NTP Pool site

2011-05-24T16:47:05Z

Today the NTP Pool site was upgraded to run on Plack and Starman instead of Apache.

Please let me know if you encounter any trouble!

This was a bit of work to get done and with this done I’ll get back to adding new features to the system. First up: Integrating some of the contributed translations and finishing the changes to support distributed monitoring and IPv6 support that Martin von Löwis started a while back.

Expanding the anycast DNS server

2011-03-11T22:42:52Z

"pool.ntp.org" is serviced by a number of DNS servers. One of them, a.ntpns.org, is actually several servers in an anycast cloud.

Until today it was just served by two nodes, one in Los Angeles and another in Luxembourg (both provided by YellowBot). Today a third node in Northern California is joining in, hosted by Sonic.net!

If you are able to provide a server (most virtual servers work, too) on a network with BGP routers to join the anycast cloud, please email ask@develooper.com.

New pool system servers

2011-01-26T08:48:09Z

Earlier today the website and monitoring system had several 10-15 minute outages while the databases got moved around; backups reconfigured etc.

Our friends at sonic.net have for years provided some servers that are used for backups and auxiliary functions to the main servers hosted by Phyber.

Recently Sonic.net also started hosting one of the excellent GPS Time Servers donated by Meinberg and when the system eventually starts doing distributed monitoring their servers will likely be the first "second monitoring system".

(While looking for links for this post, I noticed that if you want to rent a server from Sonic, they have a bunch of affordable options).

Brief outage

2010-09-30T03:01:42Z

The pool servers are having a 45 minute outage to be moved to a new datacenter.

Brief outage today

2010-09-26T00:05:03Z

The primary server in the pool system had a brief outage today after running out of memory. All is better now. Because of the distributed nature of the service itself, serving of time to ntp users around the world wasn't materially affected.

Mailing lists are moving

2010-05-09T20:36:41Z

Adrian von Bidder has generously hosted and maintained the mailing lists since he started the project 7 years ago and it's time for the lists to move. In the next few days the lists will move from fortytwo.ch to lists.ntp.org.

The 'timekeepers', 'i18n' and 'dev' lists will be moved over; but the announcements list will be discontinued since de-facto the news.ntppool.org site is where the announcements are. You can subscribe either with the Atom feed or via Feedburner's email feature at the mailing list page.

Routing trouble at the NTP Pool monitoring server

2010-04-25T21:19:39Z

Since Saturday morning the NTP Pool server have had trouble routing to some servers in the pool system (about 5%). This was too few to trigger the "help help, something's wrong!" alerts; so thanks to those of you who sent in tickets!

I opened a support with our provider and hopefully the issue will be resolved shortly.

The monitoring server is on the same network as www.pool.ntp.org (in AS 7012) if you have trouble and want to check traceroutes or BGP information from your end.

Due to the distributed nature of the pool system, time serving for clients should not be affected.

Update - One of the "upstream" providers were dropping a seemingly random group of networks. Phyber took down the BGP session to them until it's sorted and all is well again as of around 5pm pacific time.

www.pool.ntp.org is ipv6 enabled

2009-11-13T22:56:20Z

If you are IPv6 connected, the www.pool.ntp.org site will now be delivered to you via IPv6.

I did tests on a hundred thousand visitors to the site and nobody who could connect with IPv4 had trouble talking to a site with both "AAAA" and "A" records. The test only included users with javascript however, so it could still miss appliances, older boxes etc. More tests are needed to make the pool.ntp.org service "ipv6 enabled".

NTP Pool website available via IPv6

2009-10-17T02:29:22Z

In our ongoing process of getting the NTP Pool IPv6 compatible we took a first (small!) step getting the website partially available via IPv6. For now it's via an IPv6-only hostname: www6.ntppool.org.

So far the anecdotal reports are that it's working fine for people with IPv6. The next tests will be to see how connectivity is affected for everyone else if a host has both AAAA (IPv6) and A (IPv4) records in DNS.

As part of the same change, the website is now served through Varnish which makes it a bit faster and more importantly makes it inconsequential when people rudely try to "sync time" via HTTP to the server.