How to receive feedback on a pending vendor zone request

1

Dear NTP Pool community,

first of all, thank you for your work on this crucial asset of the global networking community!

As device vendors we applied for creation of vendor DNS zone about 6 weeks ago. Unfortunately we have still not received any feedback on our application that is listed in “pending” state on the web site.

I have since used both ask@ntppool.org and vendor@ntppool.org to get feedback on the status, unfortunately I have not received any confirmation that the messages were received and processed.

Is there some other official channel to make an inquiry about the state of a pending vendor zone request?

Best regards,

Vlado Handziski
R3 Solutions

2

Moin moin,

unfortunately not because the project leader @ask does the whole thing besides his main job, there can be longer waiting times and we the other admins have no insights or rights in there.

Sorry about that, you have to be patient a bit more.

Grüße aus Frankfurt

3

Moin Knot3n,

thanks for the follow-up and the clarification. We appreciate the commitment and dedication of .@ask and the team. We just wanted to make sure that our request is in the queue. We are looking forward to receiving a positive decision soon.

Grüße zurück aus Berlin

–Vlado

4

Why the need for a vendor pool?
You can simply use the standard pools.

Sorry I fail to see why vendors needs pools when the general pool is more then adequate to serve the entire internet with good time.

Why not start your own pool with your own NTP-servers?
I have my own seperate pool, friends of mine use it.

You can simply put everyone on your own NTP-servers into a DNS, all the same name but different IP and you have your own pool.

Register a domain and put your NTP-servers in it, all the same as ntp.vendor.domain, it will create your own pool.

Simple as that.

5

Bas is correct, a vendor can deploy their own DNS/NTP servers. Many do (Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.). A case can be made for vendor pools though. My example uses Fortinet’s FortiGate firewall.

FortiGate documentation says to use the NTP Pool. No problems for several years. In December 2019 Fortinet/FortiGate released broken software that sent high rate NTP bursts (sometimes exceeding 30,000 requests/sec) to NTP Pool servers world wide. I’ve been chasing this problem for over two years, Fortinet/FortiGate has not been helpful. 2.5 years later the bursts are still seen.

If FortiGate instead used a vendor pool (e.g., 0.fortigate.pool.ntp.org), one of the NTP Pool administrators could have redirected the bursts away from the NTP Pool) using DNS when the problem occurred.

There is a long history of abusive NTP clients. Vendors should never hard code an NTP Pool DNS name into their products unless a vendor pool is used.

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