On Aug 24, 2016, at 4:17 PM, [email protected] wrote: > In setting up a couple new pool servers recently, I noted there were a lot of > dead servers on the stratum two list at > support.ntp.org/bin/view/Servers/StratumTwoTimeServers > It was a bit time consuming, and frustrating, to try and find good servers > (and I'm in the US, where there are plenty of servers). Lots of back and > forth, testing them manually with ping and 'ntpdate -q’
Yup. It’s a manually maintained list in a wiki, and each entry is under the control of the person(s) who supposedly own/run that resource. > I tried to contact the webmaster over there to see if they wanted assistance > in cleaning up the list, and never got any responses, just a "hey, your email > has been put in the moderation queue”. Speaking as the postmaster and listmaster for ntp.org, you have my apologies. I won’t make excuses or try to explain how we got where we are, I will just say that we are trying to do better and we are actively working to try to improve our support for the community. However, since that list was originally created by the community, and each entry should remain under the control of the person(s) who own/run that resource, IMO it’s not really appropriate for you to be trying to actively monitor any of those systems. At least, not without their express prior approval. Moreover, the system running the website for support.ntp.org is ancient and weak, and any attempt to do any kind of “spidering” is likely to cause undue load. Perhaps to the point of making it fall over and die. Fixing that is one of the things on our long list of “TODO” items. That said, even if the hardware, operating system, web server software, etc… were all very current and highly robust, I still do not believe that it is appropriate for people to be spidering or mirroring the content from our site. At least, not without our express prior approval. If I need to clean up our robots.txt and the landing page of the wiki to make this more clear, then I will do so. > I imagine this becomes a frustration for many that are trying to contribute > to the pool, and so I wanted to do something about it. Here’s the trick — the pool.ntp.org project doesn’t actually have any relation whatsoever to the list of NTP servers you identified. They are wholly and totally separate and distinct. We are happy to provide space for pool.ntp.org within the ntp.org domain and to provide whatever other support we can, but they are actually two separate projects. If you want to improve the pool by monitoring things, then you should talk to the people who are running pool.ntp.org and currently doing the monitoring of the servers within the pool. OTOH, if you want to improve the quality of the list of NTP services listed at the URL you provided, then you should be coming to talk to the people who maintain support.ntp.org. > So I built this: http://ntp.exactlywww.com/ntp/ > It's primary purpose is to assist pool server operators in finding reliable > servers to configure their own ntpd. However, it has the side benefit of > allowing the stratum two folks to keep tabs on their servers. I've exposed > the data via a rudimentary API (details on the same page), which can be > queried using whatever service/programming language floats your boat. In > fact, with something like NodePing, you could configure a status check to > ensure that the API response always says "up: 1”. Google didn’t ask you to monitor their servers, and neither did we. Nor did we ask you to take the content from our site and repackage and distribute it in a format that is more to your liking. I’m not necessarily opposed to the goal you’re trying to achieve, but I think you’ve gone about it the wrong way and without talking to the right people. Come talk to us. We’ll be happy to work with you to see if there is a way we can make this sort of thing happen in an officially approved manner. Maybe we can work out a way so that the list of NTP servers in question is officially maintained through a real database and not just a wiki, and we can send out notices to all the currently listed maintainers so that we can get their official buy-in on moving the registry over and being remotely monitored. But you really need to come talk to us. Send e-mail to [email protected] and I’ll be monitoring the moderation queue, so that we can get your messages approved and sent through quickly. -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]>
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