[ntp:questions] ntp.cs.mu.oz.au going away - 2010-01-01

Wilson R. Afonso wafonso at csse.unimelb.edu.au
Wed Oct 28 22:46:11 UTC 2009


On Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:34:19 GMT, Unruh wrote:
> Agreed. But I am curious, since I do not see much demand on capability
> to hosting such a server, so the reason he gives is puzzling. It may be
> that the administration thinks that hosting such a server is a high
> capabilities job. Or it could be that they lost the person who really
> knew ntp and noone else feels comfortable supporting it.

The main problem is that the servers doing the job are very old and need to
be replaced; one of them is already failing. However, they all run old
versions of NetBSD with custom-made drivers supporting custom-made hardware
to interface with the GPS receiver; the people responsible for the software
and hardware are long gone from the University. Transferring the software
into new servers is not a trivial matter -- we'd probably be better off
scraping them altogether and going to a more standard package, but that
would involve more work (and money) than we can justify in the current
climate.

One secondary issue is the traffic cost incurred by the University (and the
department). We are billed for any incoming traffic not originating from
research networks, which means that we pay for most NTP requests we
receive. The amount of traffic has been going up faster than the cost of
traffic has been coming down, and it makes up a significant part of the
Internet costs for the School of Engineering.

Personally, I would love to be able to keep the service running, and it has
been a recurring subject in internal discussions over at least the last 18
months. The hardware failures we're starting to see ended up tipping the
scales towards the decision to turn the service off, sadly.

-Wilson
-- 
Wilson Roberto Afonso                  wafonso at unimelb.edu.au
Systems Administrator                         +61 3 8344 1271
IT Services                   Melbourne School of Engineering




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