Pool Management Transparency

Server operators
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Hi folks

First of all, a huge thanks to @ask and all the other volunteers who have been running the pool in their spare time for over 20 years. You folks are the Internet’s timekeepers.

I don’t mean to insult anyone here or make anyone uncomfortable, and this has probably been raised multiple times in the past.

However, I wonder if we could have the following:

  1. Transparency about who runs what in the NTP Pool
  2. Transparency about how and what channels should be used to fix things
  3. Clear indications of backup personnel for different pool activities, in case someone is on medical leave, retires, or if unforeseen circumstances arise
    • E.g: GeoDNS updates, running the site, zone updates, auth server updates

I think the community could benefit a lot from transparency—the IETF is a good example of this.

I know this may be a can of worms, but my goal is to ask why we don’t have this transparency and if we could implement it. Again, all the volunteers’ work here is to be thanked, and we should be very thankful for their time.

This transparency could help to speed up fixing things – AFIK, some of the issues we reported last year have not been fixed yet. Maybe that could help.

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Isn’t the (management of the) pool basically a one-man show?

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6205ca19352e4e7479faf9ebd4da1963
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Obligatory XKCD.

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Yeah… :wink:

I always wondered if this cartoon was actually inspired by @ask’s project …

The year matches, but I don’t think he ever lived in Nebraska?

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XKCD used Nebraska in order to protect @ask ’s privacy. :wink:

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Do you have a link to the original xkcd page handy? There are so many places this is appropriate.

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I thought it meant ImageMagick, like it says in the text. But there are a lot of similar projects. The next time a spy manages to befriend one of these unsung heroes, we might not be so lucky as to have longer build times as a tell, and a very keen observer who actually notices those, to save us from the injected backdoor.

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