If any of you guys have or are running NTP Pool servers from your homes, how/where did you obtain a static IP for the server PC/unit, preferably for free and/or while living in Europe? I am prepared to use IPv6 IPs, especially if they’re the only ones available.
Googling around on the internet, showed me somewhat confusing suggestions that I have no idea if they’d work for NTP Pool purposes or not; incl. IPv6 tunnels, DDNS, and asking my ISP (Telenor Norway) nicely (The latter of which I would be surprised if one could do in Europe). No services that I could find seemed to want to simply hand me a free IPv6 address or anything like that.
Context:
If I understand the criteria on https://www.ntppool.org/en/join.html correctly, then it’d surely be possible for me to just place a Raspberry Pi 4 in the shelf next to my main PC, keep it turned on 24/7, make sure it’s connected to a UPS backup power that’d last up to 40min, and then it’d meet all the criteria for joining the pool, or?
My internet connection would have less than 12 hours of downtime per year (Depending on factors like ISP problems), my home network’s bandwidth is 300Mb/30Mb, and it hopefully shouldn’t be a problem for me to pick 5-ish eligible Stratum 1/2/3 servers from the Nordics. Although I’d be surprised of myself if I turned out to be able to do all of the bonus setup that is listed on https://www.ntppool.org/en/join/configuration.html and https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-ntp-bcp, running such a pool micro server would be cost-efficient and relatively easy to do for someone like me who’s never dealt with Azure or other remote server interfaces.
I am somewhat of a fan of the NTP Pool project, as I like the idea of using crowdcloud time servers like yours (Especially the European ones), instead of those of NIST which I presume is an American government agency.
However, the oddly strict requirement to have a static IP is the one obstacle left I’d have to overcome, before I can feel sure in buying a RaspPi 4, case, and charger (~120€) and begin to experiment with setting up NTPD or NTPsec on it with the aim of getting it into the pool after a month or so.
“Static” is relative. You might have a contract with your ISP that you can use a certain set of IPs for the duration of the contract, but of course that’s not forever (either).
Some ISPs will allocate a particular IP and don’t promise to keep it the same, but effectively only change it during larger infrastructure changes (or sometimes if you change your equipment).
Many NTP clients are entirely IP based post-startup. Currently the system doesn’t have affordances for handling these differently than clients that’ll do DNS lookups more frequently, so the servers should stay working on the same IP for as long as is possible / reasonable. Hence the requirement for a “static” IP.
However, “static” isn’t really a technical term. It’s just what we call “IPs that aren’t expected to frequently change” and the NTP Pool system doesn’t (and can’t) enforce just how “static” it is.
If your IP changes your old IP will be removed from the system and you have to add the new to the system again (so obviously that’s bad for the NTP Pool clients and inconvenient for the operator if it happens with any regularity).
Sounds good-ish. I believe that my normal dynamic IP doesn’t change all that often, especially not my IPv4 address, but I’d have to try to keep an eye on it in the next week or two to confirm if I’m correct on my assumption.
If you have dynamic ip address from ISP, and don´t whant to pay extra for a fixed.
Is a god advice - Keep power on you ISP router (Fiber/cabel/dsl/…)
Example use a UPS. - Recomended run time - is up to you to decide. How stable is power at you site/avg outage time / longest outage… Lots to think about here.
Many isp have a lease time on you dhcp address on 30 or 60 minutes.
So a long poweroutage will give a new ip address (if isp router have no connection in the leasetime)
If ISP make maintaice or changes ip structure it also changes.
Personal i have fixed ip address, and around 4 hours UPS time at home - In the last 10 years i had 1 outage on 3 hours - so i kept my servers running, and a few short outages.
But i have to change my UPS battery this year - and I think i will reduce it to 1 hour.
I am aware this post might be a bit old but I have found a great solution. I am using a routed subnet from ExtraIP.com (IPv4). It works via a tunnel (GRE).
For IPv6 I use HE (Hurricane Electric; Tunnelbroker).
At Cinfu.com you can rent a VPS with static-IP for as little as 45 euro a year.
Via this VPS you can do anything you like, even setup a VPN to tunnel yourself static.
As a VPS is just a virtual-linux-machine with a static-IP
Commercially available VPS systems are not usually suited for tunneling pool traffic though, especially not cheap ones. If there’s only one public IP, or additional IPs are assigned directly to the VPS, then that means NAT is required in order to get the traffic through a tunnel, and NAT doesn’t play nicely with pool traffic.
To use plain routing of a public IP via a tunnel - which is necessary to avoid NAT - would require that the VPS has one or more additional public IPs, not directly assigned to the VPS, which are routed via whatever address is actually assigned to the VPS. That is a very unusual configuration, and not one that most VPS providers offer.
If you want to proceed with NAT anyway, then note that this will cause significant load on connection tracking, which will bloat the state table. It will need tuning accordingly, and may cause performance problems.
If you are going to invest in a VPS, you might just as well run ntpd / chrony / whatever directly on the said VPS and not bother with tunneling at all.
