List of Vendor Zones?

Server operators
1

Is there a vendor zone list somewhere where we can lookup companies?

I recently (yesterday) re-enabled logging and sure enough Jasper Technologies (a division of Cisco) has been continuing to pound away at my ntp server.

I tried using ‘jasper’ and ‘cisco’ for pool names and that didn’t return anything, but who knows what they could have named them (if indeed they have a valid pool).

Company Info: https://www.jasper.com/

Anyhow, in the past 24 hours I’ve received 495,640 requests total from around 140 unique IPs within their 204.156.180.0/22 netblock. Even with that subset of active IPs, only about a third-to-half are misbehaving.

I’m guessing maybe they are proxying requests for their IoT / mobile products? Or just testing a bunch of their products in-house?

This makes up only about 1% of my overall time queries within the past 24hrs, (out of ~2.4 Million unique IPs within the same time frame). Who know how many other NTP servers they are hitting too. My concern is though what happens next month / next year / etc as their products continue to scale.

So anyhow, I wanted to see if they did have a vendor zone and if they were abiding by proper use policy before I send them a nasty letter (now that I finally found a working feedback form). Whatever they are doing I bet could be done in a much more efficient and well behaved manner and achieve the same results.

1 Like
2

Hi @littlejason99 - there’s no list, but Jasper don’t have a vendor zone for them as far as I know.

Having them proxy all the connections through their network (but not running their own local infrastructure?) seems pretty weird.

I’d love to contact everyone and help them use the pool better (do proper error handling and appropriate query intervals, vendor zones, contribute to pay for the central infrastructure, run NTP servers in the pool, etc), but it’s basically infinite work and in my available “NTP Pool time” I’m plenty busy just keeping the infrastructure running smoothly.

3

Understandable. I’m going to (attempt to) contact them, let them know what is up and hopefully find out what is going on.

4

Your probably going to just get the age old “I don’t know”… or “I don’t know what your talking about”…
This should be interesting, I’ll be waiting with bells on.

1 Like
5

@ask is the vendor zones request form working? there were zones requested by some companies I’ve worked with that didn’t receive a response or get activated

6

@W2AIQ I am in this discussion with Cisco Jasper trying to bring it home for the pool. Cisco and its billions of devices need a Vendor Zone…

Don’t ring the bells yet.