4 ms·

Somewhat interesting that they themselves don't have access to the site. You'd think there would have been some disaster plans put in place?

by Maxion 10mo ago

TylerE 10mo ago
Step One of most disaster plans is not to create a second emergency.
- amelius 10mo ago
  But can't NTP server downtime cause a disaster?
  - Vosporos 10mo ago
    One (amongst many) NTP server going down creates less issues than an NTP server spreading wrong time.
    - macintux 10mo ago
      General rule of thumb: a misbehaving/slow server in any well-architected distributed system is vastly worse than a dead server.
      - xeonmc 10mo ago
        i.e. a gaslighting husband is vastly worse than a dead husband.
    - PunchyHamster 10mo ago
      technically if you have 3 or more sources that would be caught; NTP protocol was designed for that eventuality
      - da_chicken 10mo ago
        Sure, but not needing a failure to cascade to yet another failsafe is still a good idea. After all, all software has bugs, and all networks have configuration errors.
      - throw0101c 10mo ago
        > technically if you have 3 or more sources that would be caught; NTP protocol was designed for that eventuality Either go with one clock in your NTPd/Chrony configuration, or ≥4. Yes, if you have 3 they can triangulate, but if one goes offline now you have 2 with no tie-breaker. If you have (at least) 4 servers, then one can go away and triangulation / sanity-checking can still occur with the 3 remaining.
        ufocia 10mo ago
        Your probably meant trilaterate.
  - idiotsecant 10mo ago
    If your application is so critical that NTP timing loss causes disaster and your holdover fails in less than a day and you aren't generating your own via gps, you are incompetent, full stop
    - geerlingguy 10mo ago
      And if things are that critical, you might have other references besides just GPS...
      - throw0101c 10mo ago
        E.g., * https://www.meinbergglobal.com/english/products/ https://www.meinbergglobal.com/english/products/
- ronjakoi 10mo ago
  Or even just a microsecond emergency.
  - f5129cac 10mo ago
    Bravo
ssl-3 10mo ago
Maybe this is the disaster plan: There's not a smouldering hole where NIST's Boulder facility used to be, and it will be operational again soon enough. There's no present need for important hard-to-replace sciencey-dudes to go into the shop (which is probably both cold, and dark, and may have other problems that make it unsafe: it's deliberately closed) to futz around with the the time machines. We still have other NTP clocks. Spooky-accurate clocks that the public can get to, even, like just up the road at NIST in Fort Collins (where WWVB lives, and which is currently up), and in Maryland. This is just one set. And beyond that, we've also got clocks in GPS satellites orbiting, and a whole world of low-stratum NTP servers that distribute that time on the network. (I have one such GPS-backed NTP server on the shelf behind me; there's not much to it.) And the orbital GPS clocks are controlled by the US Navy, not NIST. So there's redundancy in distribution, and also control, and some of the clocks aren't even on the Earth. Some people may be bit by this if their systems rely on only one NTP server, or only on the subset of them that are down. And if we're following section 3.2 of RFC 8633 and using multiple diverse NTP sources for our important stuff, then this event (while certainly interesting!) is not presently an issue at all.
- Balgair 10mo ago
  There are many backup clocks/clusters that NIST uses as redundancies all around Boulder too, no need to even go up to Fort Collins. As in, NIST has fiber to a few at CU and a few commercial companies, last I checked. They're used in cases just like this one. Fun facts about The clock: You can't put anything in the room or take anything out. That's how sensitive the clock is. The room is just filled with asbestos. The actual port for the actual clock, the little metal thingy that is going buzz, buzz, buzz with voltage every second on the dot? Yeah, that little port isn't actually hooked up to anything, as again, it's so sensitive (impedance matching). So they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer to the rest of the world. They do the adjustments so it's all fine in the end. But you have to define something as the second, and that little unused port is it. You can take a few pictures in the cramped little room, but you can't linger, as again, just your extra mass and gravity affects things fairly quickly. If there are more questions about time and timekeeping in general, go ahead and ask, though I'll probably get back to them a bit later today.
cornholio 10mo ago
The disater plan is to have a few dozens stratum 1 servers spread around the world, each connected to a distinct primary atomic clock, so that a catastrophic disaster needs to take down the global internet itself for all servers to become unreachable. The failure of a single such server is far from a disaster.
- sounds 10mo ago
  For those of us near Boulder, it's urgent. But the stratum 1 time servers can shrug and route around the damage.
- Lammy 10mo ago
  And the disaster plan for the disaster plan is to realize that it isn't that important at the human-level to have a clock meticulously set to correspond to other meticulously-set clocks, and that every attempt to force rigid timekeeping on humans is to try to make humans work more like machines rather than to make machines work more like humans.
  - zzzeek 10mo ago
    oh....no, not really, no, the world needs GPS, so, yeah. this is not like scrooge mcduck telling you to be at work on time. scrooge still has a windup watch
  - basilgohar 10mo ago
    I really, really can't get behind this sentiment. Having a reliable, accurate time keeping mechanism doesn't seem like an outlandish issue to want to maintain. Timekeeping has been an important mechanism for humans for as long as recorded history. I don't understand the wisdom of shooting down establishing systems to make that better, even if the direct applicability to a single human's life is remote. We are all part of a huge, interconnected system whether we like it or not, and accurate, synchronized timekeeping across the world does not sound nefarious to me.
    - Lammy 10mo ago
toast0 10mo ago
If access to the site is unsafe and thus the site is closed; not having access seems reasonable. Time services are available from other locations. That's the disaster plan. I'm sure there will be some negative consequences from this downtime, especially if all the Boulder reference time sources lose power, but disaster plans mitigate negative consequences, they can't eliminate them. Utility power fails, automatic transfer switches fail, backup generators fail, building fires happen, etc. Sometimes the system has to be shut down.
- quei7Ahm 10mo ago
  At this time the local power utility shows: Total of 140 outages affecting 24,981 customers. [1] Remember - the Marshall fire started on December 30, 2021 under similar high wind conditions. [2] 1,000 structures destroyed, two deaths. [1] https://co.my.xcelenergy.com/s/outage-safety/outage-map https://co.my.xcelenergy.com/s/outage-safety/outage-map [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Fire

Somewhat interesting that they themselves don't have access to the site. You'd think there would have been some disaster plans put in place?

by Maxion 10mo ago

Somewhat interesting that they themselves don't have access to the site. You'd think there would have been some disaster plans put in place?

TylerE 10mo ago

Step One of most disaster plans is not to create a second emergency.

amelius 10mo ago
But can't NTP server downtime cause a disaster?
- Vosporos 10mo ago
  One (amongst many) NTP server going down creates less issues than an NTP server spreading wrong time.
  - macintux 10mo ago
    General rule of thumb: a misbehaving/slow server in any well-architected distributed system is vastly worse than a dead server.
    - xeonmc 10mo ago
      i.e. a gaslighting husband is vastly worse than a dead husband.
  - PunchyHamster 10mo ago
    technically if you have 3 or more sources that would be caught; NTP protocol was designed for that eventuality
    - da_chicken 10mo ago
      Sure, but not needing a failure to cascade to yet another failsafe is still a good idea. After all, all software has bugs, and all networks have configuration errors.
    - throw0101c 10mo ago
      > technically if you have 3 or more sources that would be caught; NTP protocol was designed for that eventuality Either go with one clock in your NTPd/Chrony configuration, or ≥4. Yes, if you have 3 they can triangulate, but if one goes offline now you have 2 with no tie-breaker. If you have (at least) 4 servers, then one can go away and triangulation / sanity-checking can still occur with the 3 remaining.
      - ufocia 10mo ago
        Your probably meant trilaterate.
- idiotsecant 10mo ago
  If your application is so critical that NTP timing loss causes disaster and your holdover fails in less than a day and you aren't generating your own via gps, you are incompetent, full stop
  - geerlingguy 10mo ago
    And if things are that critical, you might have other references besides just GPS...
    - throw0101c 10mo ago
      E.g., * https://www.meinbergglobal.com/english/products/ https://www.meinbergglobal.com/english/products/
ronjakoi 10mo ago
Or even just a microsecond emergency.
- f5129cac 10mo ago
  Bravo

ssl-3 10mo ago

Maybe this is the disaster plan: There's not a smouldering hole where NIST's Boulder facility used to be, and it will be operational again soon enough. There's no present need for important hard-to-replace sciencey-dudes to go into the shop (which is probably both cold, and dark, and may have other problems that make it unsafe: it's deliberately closed) to futz around with the the time machines. We still have other NTP clocks. Spooky-accurate clocks that the public can get to, even, like just up the road at NIST in Fort Collins (where WWVB lives, and which is currently up), and in Maryland. This is just one set. And beyond that, we've also got clocks in GPS satellites orbiting, and a whole world of low-stratum NTP servers that distribute that time on the network. (I have one such GPS-backed NTP server on the shelf behind me; there's not much to it.) And the orbital GPS clocks are controlled by the US Navy, not NIST. So there's redundancy in distribution, and also control, and some of the clocks aren't even on the Earth. Some people may be bit by this if their systems rely on only one NTP server, or only on the subset of them that are down. And if we're following section 3.2 of RFC 8633 and using multiple diverse NTP sources for our important stuff, then this event (while certainly interesting!) is not presently an issue at all.

Balgair 10mo ago
There are many backup clocks/clusters that NIST uses as redundancies all around Boulder too, no need to even go up to Fort Collins. As in, NIST has fiber to a few at CU and a few commercial companies, last I checked. They're used in cases just like this one. Fun facts about The clock: You can't put anything in the room or take anything out. That's how sensitive the clock is. The room is just filled with asbestos. The actual port for the actual clock, the little metal thingy that is going buzz, buzz, buzz with voltage every second on the dot? Yeah, that little port isn't actually hooked up to anything, as again, it's so sensitive (impedance matching). So they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer to the rest of the world. They do the adjustments so it's all fine in the end. But you have to define something as the second, and that little unused port is it. You can take a few pictures in the cramped little room, but you can't linger, as again, just your extra mass and gravity affects things fairly quickly. If there are more questions about time and timekeeping in general, go ahead and ask, though I'll probably get back to them a bit later today.

cornholio 10mo ago

The disater plan is to have a few dozens stratum 1 servers spread around the world, each connected to a distinct primary atomic clock, so that a catastrophic disaster needs to take down the global internet itself for all servers to become unreachable. The failure of a single such server is far from a disaster.

sounds 10mo ago
For those of us near Boulder, it's urgent. But the stratum 1 time servers can shrug and route around the damage.
Lammy 10mo ago
And the disaster plan for the disaster plan is to realize that it isn't that important at the human-level to have a clock meticulously set to correspond to other meticulously-set clocks, and that every attempt to force rigid timekeeping on humans is to try to make humans work more like machines rather than to make machines work more like humans.
- zzzeek 10mo ago
  oh....no, not really, no, the world needs GPS, so, yeah. this is not like scrooge mcduck telling you to be at work on time. scrooge still has a windup watch
- basilgohar 10mo ago
  I really, really can't get behind this sentiment. Having a reliable, accurate time keeping mechanism doesn't seem like an outlandish issue to want to maintain. Timekeeping has been an important mechanism for humans for as long as recorded history. I don't understand the wisdom of shooting down establishing systems to make that better, even if the direct applicability to a single human's life is remote. We are all part of a huge, interconnected system whether we like it or not, and accurate, synchronized timekeeping across the world does not sound nefarious to me.
  - Lammy 10mo ago

toast0 10mo ago

If access to the site is unsafe and thus the site is closed; not having access seems reasonable. Time services are available from other locations. That's the disaster plan. I'm sure there will be some negative consequences from this downtime, especially if all the Boulder reference time sources lose power, but disaster plans mitigate negative consequences, they can't eliminate them. Utility power fails, automatic transfer switches fail, backup generators fail, building fires happen, etc. Sometimes the system has to be shut down.

quei7Ahm 10mo ago
At this time the local power utility shows: Total of 140 outages affecting 24,981 customers. [1] Remember - the Marshall fire started on December 30, 2021 under similar high wind conditions. [2] 1,000 structures destroyed, two deaths. [1] https://co.my.xcelenergy.com/s/outage-safety/outage-map https://co.my.xcelenergy.com/s/outage-safety/outage-map [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Fire