- I think it's OK not to want experiments like these to be conducted connected to the global internet and rather in a lab such as the one benjojo used.
- NANOG is known to be a bit of a joke within the networking space, not too long ago someone complained about NTP issues with traffic passing through TATA and they were told to make their devices stratum 0 or something to that effect, so don't always take them too seriously.
I think the first applies here.
Not saying your summary of that thread is wrong, I just wanted to expand a bit to maybe clarify:
- someone posted to NANOG about issues with their (European) servers reaching 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org
- they noticed they were being routed through Tata (AS6453)
- they mentioned that their other servers (e.g. in Africa) had no issues
- they posted to NANOG to ask about this
- they thought it was a routing or FreeBSD issue (they later posted about the issue to a FreeBSD list as well)
- the NTP pool uses GeoDNS to map clients to servers
- the OP's server IP address was incorrectly geolocated to Mauritius
- the Mauritius zone in the pool has only one server
- so the OP would only ever get that IP as an answer
Full thread here:
https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2023-August/222706.html
From there, that sub-thread was mostly about NTP attacks and GPS security and mounting receivers on top of datacenter buildings and such.
Counting up the messages (if my mail client's threading capabilities are to be trusted), of the 94 or so total messages in the thread, 79 (84%) of the messages were in that GPS-related subthread, and only 15 messages responded to the OPs issue directly.
I didn't really see this as a failing of NANOG per-se, it's just a public mailing list and some folks went on a nerd sniping tangent (cf. XKCD #356).