Newbie question regarding zone assignments and the beta site

Server operators
1

Greetings, after benefiting from the NTP pool for 2 decades and wanting to contribute for many years I am finally in a position to do so.

Reading through the mailing list archives etc has been very educational. I have turned up a bunch of servers and after some chaotic hiccups I have achieved stable scores and tweaked things to a level that I can sustainably serve.

Two questions though:

  1. The beta site: https://web.beta.grundclock.com/ - I just want to clarify that the beta site is only for R&D as of now and any sites I add, remove or change traffic setting there are not actually taking effect, right? In other words if I add 1.2.3.4 in production and beta site, the beta site will only monitor it but the traffic setting on prod will be effective, anything I set there on beta will not do anything.

  2. Zone assignments. If we use Maxmind, the database must be more than a few weeks old. I turned up servers in Asian regions that really need help but the system put them in wrong zones. I did note that in the comments box when I added the servers a few days ago but no ticket was generated. I then e-mailed server-owner-help@ntppool.org which did not generate a ticket either. I e-mail them from an office365 work address. Should e-mails to ask@ntppool.org or server-owner-help@ntppool.org generate a ticket auto-reply ? I do not want to mailbomb them but I do want to make sure my issue is seen because I can serve Korea and Australia but they are currently tagged JP and US.

2

Hi @zeroav

Yes, I believe that’s the case.

As a volunteer admin with limited permissions, I saw your email come through, but following the outage I couldn’t get into the management system… nor get any response from @ask :man_facepalming:.

The DNS issues seem to have fixed themselves now so I’ll update your zone settings shortly.

Maybe this is as good a place as any to say… as far as I can tell @ask is the only person with full admin permissions to the pool and probably the only one with physical access to the main servers, so I wouldn’t connect anything mission critical to the pool!

Yes, I’ve tried to raise the issue in private over many months, but I never get a reply from @ask. It doesn’t take my 30+ years of (Project) Management to tell me that having an uncontactable single point of failure on a live system isn’t a good thing…!

I don’t have the coding skills nor the desire to have full admin permissions and I don’t live in the US so I couldn’t have physical access to the servers either, but I think it’s right to point out what I see as a Major Risk to pool users (and maybe those who’ve added their servers to the pool if the DNS system were to stop updating and traffic was continuously directed to their server). :warning: :stop_sign:

3

Thank you! I see some of my servers are starting to change zones right now! 3>