Only a 3D-printed case is missing! ![]()
this is beautiful, love it.
Those are some tight numbers, awesome, keep it up
Hey boy’s ‘n girls, just a quick update on my home setup. Over the years i have come to realize that operating a time server is not only about the timeserver itself, but also about how it is connected to the internet.
This spring i have swapped out the dreadful fritz!box and replaced it with a proper router.
I managed to get my hands on a professional Opnsense 19” rack router with Opnsense: it’s a Deciso dec3840, which is fitted with an AMD EPYC Embedded 3101 and 16GB RAM and 2x10Gb SFP+ ports.
Likely to be overkill for the 5 servers i run but i like to come well-prepared. Last few months i have learned myself FreeBSD/Opnsense and i am currently satisfied with the flexibility and power it brings. Energy consumption is ok (~15W continuous) and a little higher than the Fritz, but the opnsense router is in a completely other league. Happy to share more if there’s interest.
I noticed that Fritz isn’t to blame, well partly but they have fixed the NAT-table-size as it was far too small.
However, it’s the pool itself that requests too much as such overloading the tables and thus slowdown routers.
My DrayTek also slowed down to a crawl and ik can handle 50K NAT translations, same happens to the Fritz but faster. Don’t know now, didn’t test, but they updated the cache-size for NAT-tables. UDP etc.
Just took a tiny bit longer because the table-cache was bigger. Doesn’t matter.
My server got hit so hard that I’m serving big parts of Belgium together with 21 other servers, while EU-zone servers (a lot more in total) are not asked to help the Belgian zone.
As such routers can’t deal with the load and slowdown. This is a pool algorithm problem.
I complained for a few years now, but never found the problem. So again I took my servers offline.
Such a ‘NTP-DDOS’ should not happen, but it does, sadly.
Btw: My Opnsense box does VLAN on WAN fine. it just can be a little complicated to setup.
Just for info: the router is handling ~5% of NL IPv6 traffic (~1000 qps / 86 million per day) with 3% cpu and ~10000 firewall states.
This is my setup. I have two Microchip TimeProvider 4100 appliances, one active, one backup.
The currently active is a Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator GNSS disciplined device.
The backup is a Rubidium atomic clock GNSS disciplined device. I’m busy dumping it’s flash(two weeks to dump!) to hack it, hence it’s offline status.
Very impressive Errolt.
I find it still incredible that you have found these servers at your local e-waste dump ![]()
What do you have installed for a router?
Everything in the photo, except the wall box and copper containing wiring, came from e-waste recycling, including fiber patch cables, 50m fiber droplines running from firewall to this wallbox, fiber SFP transceivers, poe switch and the two time servers. There is a time rated gnss antenna splitter in the side of the wall box so both time servers get the same gnss signal, and the antenna is also a Symmetricom timing antenna, both also ewaste. ![]()
My router/firewall also came from e-waste recycler. It is a Sophos XG115rev3 firewall appliance. Sophos made this whole XG line EOL in March this year, so I’ve seen a lot of them being recycled. But running OPNsense on it works much better then Sophos’ own software, so no real loss that sophos decided to EOL them(And you have to buy the sohpos hardware, then buy a term limited firewall license to use the device? Or you get a 3 year license with the device then you need to buy a new license to continue using it?).
I do want to upgrade to a XG125, which is ready to take over, but I have to take my connection down, which will impact my NTP service. And I would like to upgrade the ram on the XG125 before doing the switchover. But finding Very Low Profile DDR4 ram isn’t all that easy.
My big mess….it was my old shack….
Server below….
Garmin GPS module below…
Modem, router, UPS and lot of other stuff….
It’s dusty, as we have big dogs that bring a lot of dust in the house….but we don’t use this room….so it’s for modems, routers…..the box below the Fritzbox 5690Pro is my websdr.heppen.be realtime HF-receiver.
On the left is a Kenwood TS-590…not in use. This is my crap ![]()
My new shack to test stuff and do some HamRadio….
This is my shit ![]()






