- Wind gusts were reaching 125 MPH in Boulder county, if anyone’s curious. A lot of power was shut off preemptively to prevent downed power lines from starting wildfires. Energy providers gave warning to locals in advance. Shame that NIST’s backup generator failed, though.
by glkindlmann
4 subcomments
- Of the various internet .+P, NTP is one I never learned about as a student, so now I'm looking at its web page [1] by its creator David L. Mills (1938-2024). I've found one video of him giving a retrospective of his extensive internet work; he talks about NTP at 34:51 [2] and later at 56:26 [3].
[1] https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html
[2] https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?si=WXJCV_v0qlZQK3m4&t=2092
[3] https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?si=K80ThtYZWcOAxUga&t=3386
- > Facility operators anticipated needing to shutdown the heat-exchange infrastructure providing air cooling to many parts of the building, including some internal networking closets. As a result, many of these too were preemptively shutdown with the result that our group lacks much of the monitoring and control capabilities we ordinarily have
Having a parallel low bandwidth, low power, low waste heat network infrastructure for this suddenly seems useful.
- NIST campus status: Due to elevated fire risk and a power outage for the Boulder area, the DOC Boulder Labs campus is CLOSED on December 19 for onsite business and no public access is permitted; previously approved accesses are revoked.[1]
WWV still seems to be up, including voice phone access.
NIST Boulder has a recorded phone number for site status, and it says that as of December 20, the site is closed with no access.
NIST's main web site says they put status info on various social media accounts, but there's no announcement about this.
[1] https://www.nist.gov/campus-status
by cdfuller
11 subcomments
- Can anybody expand on the implications of this?
Being unfamiliar with it, it's hard to tell if this is a minor blip that happens all the time, or if it's potentially a major issue that could cause cascading errors equal to the hype of Y2K.
- FYI, this was posted a month ago when discussing thermal effects of clock drift. I thought it was quite interesting view of what the WWVB location looks like:
https://jila.colorado.edu/news-events/articles/spare-time
Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46042946
by crazydoggers
0 subcomment
- Status of NIST time servers:
https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi
by HocusLocus
1 subcomments
- Old sci-fi story of mine, maybe the only one ever inspired by NTP
THE TIME RIFT OF 2100: How We lost the Future --- and Gained the Past.
https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7132077&cid=493082...
- This makes me wonder, if you take the average time of all wristwatches on the planet, accounting for timezones and throwing out outliers, how close would you get to NTP time?
And how many randomly chosen wristwatches would you need to get anything reasonable?
- We had some fun requesting key for accessing nist time servers. the process is (quoted from website)
NIST currently offers this service free of charge. We require written requests to arrive by U.S. mail or fax containing:
Your organization’s name, physical address, fax number (if desired as a reply method).
One or more point-of-contact personnel or system operators authorized to receive key data and other correspondence: names, phone numbers, email addresses.
Up to four static IPv4 network addresses under the user’s control which will be allowed to use the unique key. By special arrangement, additional addresses or address ranges may be requested.
Desired hash function (“key type”). NIST currently supports MD5, SHA1, SHA256, and HMAC-SHA256. Please list any limitations your client software places on key values, if known: maximum length, characters used, or whether hexadecimal key representations are required. If you prefer, please share details about your client software or NTP appliance so we can anticipate key format issues.
Desired method for NIST’s reply: U.S. mail, fax, or a secure download service operated by Department of Commerce.
NIST will not use email for sending key data.
ps. there actually seems to be improvement over what they had year ago. they added "secure download service". and previously they had message that nobody assigned to actively monitor mailbox so if you didn't get key, please email us so we will check it
- Can anybody speak to the current best practices around running underground power lines? I see these types of articles about above-ground distribution systems from time-to-time, particularly in California. I feel lucky that my area has underground power, but that was installed back in the 1980s. Would it be prohibitively expensive for Boulder’s utility provider to move to underground distribution? I can’t help but think it could be worth the cost to reduce wildfire risk and offer more reliable service.
- This was an NTP 0 server right? What is the actual failback mechanism when that level of NTP server fails?
This is some level of eldritch magic that I am aware of, but not familiar with but am interested in learning.
by 8organicbits
1 subcomments
- The referenced mailing list is this Google Group (https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/internet-time-se...) which has some other posts about this incident.
- So far I think I'm still seeing one of them in my peers list for my public-ish NTP server:
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
==============================================================================
+time-e-b.nist.g .NIST. 1 u 372 1024 377 125.260 1.314 0.280
- One question I have is did DOGE decisions have anything to do with this? Because I know they took knives to NIST.
by stackghost
0 subcomment
- Direct link, rather than a repost: https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/internet-time-se...
- My local GPS + PPS based NTP server finally pays off.
- It’d be a good idea to protect our infrastructure from the climate we created.
It’s just a good idea, though, not a greedy one… so it won’t happen.
- I just got home from a holiday party where two people from NIST in Boulder work on the NIST-F1 Atomic Clock. The one scientist described the outage and the failures but reported that things are still shut down even after power was restored. She told me that she believes that the Trump administration is in the process of shutting down the program and server in Boulder. And there was low confidence in that the Washington DC superiors understood what they are doing. God I hope this isn't more Tina Peters retribution crap. Cutting off our nose to spite our face.
- Man, they're having a hell of a time up in Boulder.
- Generator maintenance is a thing.
- This is terrible. It’s always sad to hear about things like this.
by renewiltord
1 subcomments
- Well, where did NTP at NIST last put it? Did they look there?
by keepamovin
0 subcomment
- For future reference of civilization: if a facility is critical, it must have a SMR.
by user3939382
1 subcomments
- It’s fine. The public pays for sci-fi clocks used by NIST and the Navy and we get shit latency over NTP and a WWVB signal that barely reaches a huge chunk of the country. CLOCKS WE PAID FOR. Jane Street gets lightning access to clocks and our pension managers get their NTP trades front run. NTP is a disgrace and an insult when it is working.
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