Hello!
We’re having problems using NTP Pool in the Philippines
Both our and our vendor hostnames and the generic pool hostname resolve to an address in the range 203.177.21.121-4. Although the monitor scores for these servers are good, any NTP client I’ve used times-out when making a request.
Any suggestions as to what might be going on gratefully received.
I see the same thing. I’ve tried ntpd, sntp, and ntpdate and none can raise a useful response from those servers. Perhaps the operator just wanted the monitoring and crafted a filter that is specific to the packets from the bespoke SNTP code in the pool monitors, or discovered their IPs and filters out all others.
Of course, they could just set the server IPs to “monitoring only” and get the monitoring without fouling operation for pool users in the Phillipines…
Hello @jonathan.miles, welcome to the community!
The Philippines page you referred to states that there are not enough servers registered in ph.pool.ntp.org zone, so the clients in Philippines will be served from the Asia zone.
Probably you should not query directly the ph.pool.ntp.org servers, instead make query against 2.pool.ntp.org.
(By the way, the single server in 2.ph.pool.ntp.org answers over IPv6.)
Hello @NTPman
Probably you should not query directly the ph.pool.ntp.org servers, instead make query against 2.pool.ntp.org.
We’re not directly querying ph.pool.ntp.org. Those are the only servers that come back when querying our vendor hostname (or pool.ntp.org) from within the Philippines.
Forgive Jonathan, our welcome new community member, for he has sinned. He’s likely unaware that only the 2.*.pool.ntp.org provides IPv6 addresses, which is easily forgiven. He may also be using devices that don’t support IPv6, which is less forgivable, but we are a friendly bunch. 
By the way, he was right, with IPv4 blinders, those servers were the only members of ph.pool… It looks like one of the pool admins has fixed that now.
To beat a very old drum, why oh why is IPv6 still hidden under 2.blah.pool? When IPv6 have parity with IPv4 in the NTP pool?
I may have accidentally flagged this post. I saw a browser flash and the post was hidden, if it was me I apologize and I can’t find a way to unflag it.
I, of course, request forgiveness for our sins and will endeavour to ensure IPv6 support in the future (although that will just be the devices, unfortunately one cannot legislate for the ISP those devices are connected to). However, to do this for all devices in the field we’ll need working IPv4 support, including the Philippines.
This leads me back to the original problem: if a device is in the Philippines any requests to the IPv4 servers returned from our vendor hostnames time-out, even though the monitors are reporting that those servers are OK.
There definitely seems to be something broken with A queries for ph.pool.ntp.org right now:
C:\ntp>dig +short any ph.pool.ntp.org.
203.177.21.124
203.177.21.123
203.177.21.121
203.177.21.122
C:\ntp>Yet the scores for all 4 are below 10:
