Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2025-12)

Updated 2025-12-07.

Tech updates: NTP battering...

Christmas time and maximum ad revenue are upon us...

2025-12-07: NTP Battery

About 18 months ago I was getting fed up with the volume of NTP traffic still hitting my no-longer stratum-1 server on my little RPi3.

Getting out of being people's secondary authoritative DNS server is hard in a similar vein...

I had tried many ways to mitigate such traffic, I suspected in part baked into software or even consumer device firmware, so took the drastic step of removing the ntp1.exnet.com DNS entry, though did not otherwise adjust the server.

Did it help? Maybe, maybe not, but there are still ~20 NTP packets per second, including replies to the queries that the server does not now ignore outright.