Volunteers needed

Asmall news story that caught my eye recently was the reported issues with the NTP Pool project ( www.pool.ntp.org). Traffic to the pool increased by a large amount (something like a twentyfold increase at its highest point). After some investigation, it was determined that a buggy version of the Snapchat app on the iPhone was to blame and the company to its credit dealt with it very quickly. But it did highlight that this widely used resource – timeservers used by millions of clients – runs on systems donated by volunteers.

At the time of writing, there are 3,606 servers in the worldwide pool which seems quite a small amount in relation to the amount of work they actually do. Of course, it’s likely in your professional capacity that your systems are synchronised to a paidfor service.

Spare some time

This is absolutely the thing to do when having your systems set to the correct time is vitally important. But it’s also probably the case that more systems that you think (especially at home) are quietly using the pool, which is only going to get busier and busier. So my appeal to readers with a static IP address and a permanent internet connection (and a bit of spare time) is to donate a few hundred bytes per second to the project. On the project website (take a look here: www.pool.ntp.org/en/join.html) are instructions for how to join and set up a server. I’m sure the type of people who read this column will have no problems getting one up and running (and if you haven’t done this kind of thing before it’s a fun little exercise). This is a long-term commitment (read the caveats on the project site!) but I think it would be awesome to hear from LXF readers who contribute to something which helps the entire internet community. jolyon.brown@gmail.com.