One of the most interesting things we saw in the proposed IEEE 1588 enterprise profile was a bold suggestion on fault tolerance that looked familiar. Here’s FSMLabs press release from September 2011 TimeKeeper 5.0 offers the ability to monitor multiple
Measuring NTPd in the Cloud II
The problem with ntpd is the sudden performance degradations which can occur when conditions deviate from ‘ideal’. We have detailed these robustness issues of ntpd in prior work, including [17, 18]. Simply put, when path delay variability exceeds some threshold, which is a complex function
NTPd DOS attacks
Miscreants who earlier this week took down servers for League of Legends, EA.com, and other online game services used a never-before-seen technique that vastly amplified the amount of junk traffic directed at denial-of-service targets. Rather than directly flooding the targeted services with
Challenges upgrading time synchronization in a global financial company
The real-world challenges of trying to upgrade time-synchronization without TimeKeeper are described in an excellent 2012 technical paper about a project at the company IMC Global Finance [IMC]. The article documents a two year, highly resourced project run by an
Time Maps in Action
This shows a time map for a client (center) that is getting NTP time from a variety of standard internet NTP servers and via a customer site (to the left). A TimeKeeper Pocket GrandMaster (bottom left) is serving multiple Stratum
Time Synchronization in the Cloud
Synchronizing clocks in the cloud, especially for virtual machines, is way beyond the capabilities of ordinary synchronization methods. Tests show that virtual machines in the cloud relying on NTPd can fall off the reference time by tens of minutes over
Mitre and GPS spoofing
Some slides on GPS timing vulnerabilities.
The business case for being time protocol agnostic.
Time Synchronization and Distribution is a business critical issue but it is easy to become bogged down in arcane technology/marketing controversies. One of those controversies is over the choice between low level network protocols used to deliver time to application