Introduction
Active Servers
- Africa 54
- Asia 300
- Europe 2758
- North America 954
- Oceania 136
- South America 64
- Global 3993
- All Pool Servers 4254
The pool.ntp.org project is a big virtual cluster of timeservers providing reliable easy to use NTP service for millions of clients.
The pool is being used by hundreds of millions of systems around the world. It's the default "time server" for most of the major Linux distributions and many networked appliances (see information for vendors).
Because of the large number of users we are in need of more servers. If you have a server with a static IP address always available on the internet, please consider adding it to the system.
The project is maintained and developed by Ask Bjørn Hansen and a great group of contributors on the mailing lists. The source code for the system is available.
Hosting and bandwidth for the "hub" servers are provided by Packet and NetActuate.
go upNews
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September 6, 2019
NTP Pool servers on Kubernetes on Packet
Packet is awesome.
When we started planning our recent unplanned server move, we investigated options for having not one, but two sites, for the “hub” systems for the NTP Pool. With 4000 NTP servers and hundreds of millions of clients using the system, it really should be a given!
Evaluating our options on a ridiculously short timeframe, Packet stood out as an interesting choice, though we were a little apprehensive at first if their setup would be too unusual compared to more familiar options.
After a quick chat with some of the friendly staff at Packet, we were off to the races to see if we could get everything migrated in less than a week of nights and weekends. If we could, we’d be able to move the physical servers the following Sunday without downtime to any critical services, and get us closer to having proper redundancy.
Working with the Packet system has been fascinating and extremely productive. Despite having done this sort of work for several decades, it was a surprise how mixing familiar capabilities, APIs and abstractions opened new ways for quickly building and managing powerful, reliable and scalable infrastructure.
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September 5, 2019
New Account Features
The beta site has been updated with new features for managing the accounts. Until now each server had to be associated with just one user login. In the new system servers are associated with an account that can have multiple user logins. If you can, please try it out and post bug reports or suggestions in the development forum or via email. -
August 27, 2019
NTP Pool servers hosted at NetActuate
The NTP Pool consists of (as of this writing) more than 4000 NTP servers provided by the community, about 40 DNS servers and a good handful of “hub servers” running the website, databases, monitoring (for NTP, DNS, etc) and a bunch of other software to keep the system going. This spring we learned that the facility the systems were in was being decommissioned and we needed to find other arrangements, quickly. -
April 5, 2019
GPS rollover
As you might have seen in the news or from the US CERT, there’s an internal counter in the GPS messages that will “rollover” this week. Poorly implemented GPS receivers might lose track of time because of this. Many servers in the NTP Pool are using GPS signals to set the time, either directly or indirectly from another server that listens for GPS signals. The expected impact on users of the NTP Pool is very little or none at all. -
May 21, 2017
How to Configure NTP for Use in the NTP Pool Project
Daniel Ziegenberg wrote a tutorial for Digital Ocean on configuring NTP for the NTP Pool on Ubuntu. Oliver Nadler has another tutorial covering non-Ubuntu, too. - Older news...
Links
- Terms of service
- NTP home - the website about ntp
- The NTP Pool DNS server uses GeoIP data from MaxMind to help choose an NTP server from the Pool.
- Meinberg, makers of incredibly fine time server systems.
- The Public servers abuse and the Fixing the NTP server abuse problem threads on the comp.protocols.time.ntp newsgroup have caused this project to be started.