[ntp:questions] bitsy.mit.edu retired?

David L. Mills mills at udel.edu
Fri Aug 15 18:56:58 UTC 2008


Gushi,

Bitsy.mit.edu is alive, but not running NTP for whatever reason.

Bitsy.udel.edu was among the first public timetellers in the world, 
including clepsydra.decwrl.com and fuzzball dcn1.arpa (128.4.1.1). They 
first chimed circa 1984. Of the three, only 128.4.1.1 has public chime, 
but now a Pentium called rackety.udel.edu.

Dave

Gushi wrote:

> On Aug 14, 7:29 pm, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net>
> wrote:
> 
>>Gushi wrote:
>>
>>>Hey all,
>>
>>>I've frequently used the venerable old standby "bitsy.mit.edu" as an
>>>NTP server -- it had an easy to remember name, and was more "neutral"
>>>than time.windows.com or something similar.  I also recall that it had
>>>a fairly open access policy, and over time I had committed the IP
>>>address (18.72.0.3) to memory.
>>
>>>At the current time (no pun intended) I'm unable to get any NTP data
>>>from it, and it's not on any of the lists -- has it been retired or
>>>shuffled off?  Or am I just crazy?
>>
>>>-Dan Mahoney
>>
>>The fact that it's not on any of the lists suggests that it's not a
>>public server!  The fact that you can't get any response to an NTP query
>>suggests that it's not running ntpd.
> 
> 
> Thanks for the tier-one diagnostic there.
> 
> My hope was more to hear from people who had "gotten a memo" that I
> had missed about its retirement, or possibly even hear from an MIT
> admin who might have been able to answer.  I had previously (for about
> ten years) gotten valid ntp responses from that server.  I can do a
> google search and find dozens of references to it, being used publicly
> and in many sample ntp.conf files.  On top of that, I recall in the
> past looking it up and finding it on an "official" servers list.
> 
> http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=bitsy.mit.edu+ntp
> 
> 
>>Can you ping it?  It might not be running at all!
> 
> 
> It's pingable.
> 
> -Dan




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