IP lists for different Zones?

So clearly there is some list somewhere that ntp pool assigns to each country that is in each zone… For example my server is in the north american zone, and in the us.

What I am looking for is an easy cidr listing of this NA zone so I can use it to limit who can query my server. I for sure could create my own from multiple sources and can see what countries are included in the NA zone from here.
http://www.pool.ntp.org/zone/north-america

But it would be so much easier if there was already list that was available. I would think there has to be if they are creating the zones in the first place. Have to know and setup what netblocks are in these zones, etc…

A url that is updated every now and then that points to a text file with IP/cidr would be freaking fantastic :wink:

There’s no guarentee that the clients are on the same continent or in the same country; it’s a “best efforts” based on the clients DNS server and the GeoIP database from MaxMind.

What is it you’d like to do?

I would like to take this list and on my firewall limit inbound to my ntp server. So that users that are not in NA can not query…

Be it your listing your using is 100% accurate or not really an issue.

Or could just setup the rules to allow but log those that are not in the list, and not log the traffic that comes from NA listed IPs, etc. There are plenty of places I could create my own listing from… Was just curious since you have created pools specific for say north america zone, that you would already have an easy to get to list of these IP blocks?

I recall back when was playing around and just did short sniff of like 1 hour of traffic, that the top IPs doing queries where not even in NA… A simple listing of what ntp considers NA would allow me to just log those that are not in that list, etc.

That sounds like a bad idea. Foreign traffic exists, but is usually limited – the Snapchat incident is a notable exception, but its worst harm was to servers in other countries from clients in the US anyway – and no IP geolocation database is perfectly accurate. Indeed, in some ways, they’re getting worse over time as desperate ISPs acquire IPv4 ranges from anywhere they can find them.

Trying to block such traffic will save you a small amount of bandwidth and harm a small portion of Pool users.

Are you sure they really weren’t in North America? And even if they weren’t, how harmful were they? A high traffic US server has hundreds of thousands or millions of clients, and receives thousands of queries per second. A small number of abusive clients are a disproportionate but still small percentage of total traffic.

Also, you can block or rate-limit them, with NTP’s built-in rate-limiting facilities or in other ways, based on their behavior instead of their location.

In any case, the geo IP database is provided by a third party, and anyone can download it from them.

LIke I said I know I can download lists of IP blocks for different countries - what I was asking if it was provided somewhere on ntp.org

Why do people keep bringing up accuracy?? That has nothing to do with what I am asking…

Nevermind I will just create my own list… Who said anything about worried about bandwidth?? Who said anything about worried about them doing something bad?

Just on principle sake - I am in the NA zone, maybe I don’t want non NA users hitting me… For starters if they are not in NA using a NA ntp is prob not a good choice in the first place, etc.

Okay. That’s a reasonable enough question. And the answer is that it’s a widely available third-party list, and it probably never occurred to @ask to redistribute it.

This principle will slightly harm a small portion of users, and won’t significantly benefit anyone.

Geolocation errors would be a real problem if a large portion of servers blocked foreign traffic.

IMHO this is simply a bad idea please don’t do it as you will end up unintentionally impacting end users.

Unfortunately a fact of providing a public service is that sometimes people will end up using it that you don’t intend.

Deliberately causing outages for unwitting end users doesn’t feel like the spirit of being a pool participant IMHO.

Fair enough… How about just using the list as just a logger to get an idea of how many are out of zone… This info could be useful and interesting.

I can allow while log sort of thing. But only log the ones that are not in my zone… Or you just have a shitton of entries in your log :wink:

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The closest to a list like that would be the various GeoIP databases, for example MaxMind.

It’d indeed be interesting to learn about what clients servers in different region sees.

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Next week i’m going to experiment with elasticsearch and logstash to make something like a map for each of my Server to visualize that

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This is for one of my servers from the AU zone. The other servers will follow. Then i could you give access to that, if you want ?

PS: At the moment this are packets and not new connections

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Hi Jan-Philipp,

how did you create this nice image ?

// Hans

That’s really neat. One of my long-term-roadmap things is to have a small program operators can run that’ll use pcap (for example) to capture ntp packets and do analytics on them.

Optionally it could also send summary data or sampled data to a central service that could process the data similarly to what you did with Grafana.

How are you storing the data to do the visualization?

Sorry for the late answer Hans and Ask :slight_smile:

The data were stored in a ElasticSearch Cluster.
The data was generated by iptables.
I’ve created a rule for ntp packets. Normally it is written to syslog but i’ve configured the rsyslog daemon to send the message to Logstash.
And Logstash insert it into ElasticSearch.

The message contains the source ip of the packet. So Grafana can use the ip for visualization.

But you can use also json or something else.

Out of my own experience at my company, ElasticSearch needs a lot of memory for indexing.
And a lot of nodes for indexing when you have a large amount of data.

If you want CIDR format lists for each country try here http://www.ipdeny.com/ipblocks/

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I run a number of Pool servers, mostly Stratum 2, some (in Singapore) Stratum 1. The Stratum 1s come and go.

For my Stratum 2, I confifure them (with servers as)

  • My Stratum 1s
  • Couple of pool servers not run by me, in the same country
  • Couple of pool servers in other countries

The last is to prevent all of Singapore’s pool servers syncing between themselves, and deciding to set up a UTC-Singapore :slight_smile:

Hopefully the GPS servers, and random tickers in Germany or Korea will outvote us, and keep us sane.