Revisiting Time: UT1, UTC, NTP and NTS(potaroo.net)

33 pointsby pabs3vor 4 Monaten5 comments

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-03/nts.html

5 comments

gmokkivor 4 Monaten

I would recommend using PTP on all clouds. The accuracy is more than 10x to NTP. It consumes less CPU. It does not use network traffic and thus can not be attacked, even if UDP is open to internet or if network stack is under DoS.

All clouds except AWS is easy: just `modprobe ptp_kvm` and point chrony at /dev/ptp0

On AWS it depends on instance type: some older do not support it at all, some support it via the network driver, some via the kvm PTP driver.

pabs3vor 4 Monaten

Wikipedia says PTP uses UDP, that is network traffic? or did you mean Internet traffic?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol

Edit: ah, you are talking about virtual PTP, which is presumably PTP to the hypervisor instead of network servers. The hypervisor would then keep its own time in sync using GPS, network PTP or NTP.

https://kimmo.suominen.com/blog/2022/09/virtual-ptp-hardware...

7777777philvor 4 Monaten

NTS requires both ends. More public NTS servers help, but the installed base of plain NTP clients, routers and embedded systems that will never get a firmware update, keeps unauthenticated NTP as the default regardless.. every government that funds an atomic clock could run an authenticated public time service. Almost none have.

Huston is one of the few people who makes leap second arithmetic readable.

malkleravor 4 Monaten

Really informative.

Quite inconsiderate of Earth not cooperating with our obsession with precision.

00zaynvor 4 Monaten

NTS is basically stateless authenticated time, which is a much bigger deal than just "secure NTP".