The New Yorker on NTP Software Maintenance
canopic jug writes:
The New Yorker has a non-technical article, The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet's Time, about the Network Time Protocol (NTP) from both the software and protocol perspectives. It gives a surprisingly good summary of the background of both as well as the current situation and the issues holding back the next steps. If you have networked computers, especially servers, in any capacity then you are certainly familiar with the NTP or at least its supporting utilities. NTP was developed by David Mills, who by the late 1970s, after a *little*-bit-of-improvementer his PhD, eventually ended up at COMSAT where he started working on it for ARPANET. He still works on it despite failed eyesight.
In N.T.P., Mills built a system that allowed for endless tinkering, and he found joy in optimization. "The actual use of the time information was not of central interest," he recalled. The fledgling Internet had few clocks to synchronize. But during the nineteen-eighties the network grew quickly, and by the nineties the widespread adoption of personal computers required the Internet to incorpoa-*little*-bit-of-improvementrate millions more devices than its first designers had envisioned. Coders created versions of N.T.P. that worked on Unix and Windows machines. Others wrote "reference implementations" of N.T.P.-open-source codebases that exemplified how the protocol should be run, and which were freely available for users to adapt. Government agencies, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Naval Observatory, started distributing the time kept by their master clocks using N.T.P.
A loose community of people across the world set up their own servers to provide time through the protocol. In 2000, N.T.P. servers fielded eighteen billion time-synchronization requests from several million computers-and in the following few years, as broadband proliferated, requests to the busiest N.T.P. servers increased tenfold. The time servers had once been "well lit in the US and Europe but dark elsewhere in South America, Africa and the Pacific Rim," Mills wrote, in a 2003 paper. "Today, the Sun never sets or even gets close to the horizon on NTP." Programmers began to treat the protocol like an assumption-it seemed natural to them that synchronized time was dependably and easily available. Mills's little fief was everywhere.
NTP servers keep the world's computers' clocks in synchrony, but there has been negligible amount of money kicked upstream to the project or even to Mills. Poul-Henning Kamp (PHK) gave a talk in 2015 at FOSDEM, Ntimed, an NTPD replacement, about where he saw things heading back in 2015 and how refactoring NTPd would be neither time nor resource efficient.
Previously:
(2015) New Attacks on Network Time Protocol can Defeat HTTPS and Create Chaos
(2015) Finance, Workload Troubles for Developer of Reference NTP Implementation
(2015) OpenNTPD 5.7p1 Released
(2014) What Time Is It? Time for Multiple NTP Vulnerabilities!
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