Hacker News Reader

Comment by brian_cunnie | Hacker News Reader

[author]

Digital Ocean is a great deal! Thanks for pointing that out.

The reason I use {aws,azure,google} to host my NTP servers is that my day job is developing a VM orchestrator (BOSH) for Cloud Foundry, and BOSH doesn't support Digital Ocean yet (AFAIK). But that's a personal choice, and an admittedly expensive one.

View on HN

Why not just use the public pool? A virtualized NTP server isn't the ideal scenario and there are plenty of "not quite 100% public" NTP servers you could use as well (i.e. you first have to send an e-mail to get access).

Funnily enough, last time I had NTP troubles, it was on a BOSH deployment. BOSH wants to use ntpdate to keep time (because real NTP is too normal?) and we'd overzealously configured the security groups around our NAT setup so the machines couldn't reach their NTP server. Whoops.

It'd be nice if BOSH could have detected this problem and warned us about it, ideally during deployment. But it'd be even nicer if we didn't suck at configuring AWS. If you could fix either of those things, that would be great!

What about amazon lightsail?

It also runs on AWS so even though they try to trick you into thinking you don't pay for bandwidth you do. Also small EC2 instances are throttled so their server would probably not function most of the time.

They include 1TB BW in the $5 instance, that's $90 savings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com