Meet your new Time Server | Hacker News Reader

Meet your new Time Server

centerclick.com

18 pointsmooreds18 comments

I’d like to add NTP to my on-prem infra so that clients/servers can agree on when certificates have expired. This box would almost do the job, but it doesn’t seem to support secure NTP. Secure NTP allows a client to cryptographically verify that time was delivered from a trusted source and not a spoofer. Without this mechanism, spoofing is trivial, which means making compromised certificates appear valid is also all too easy.

Most of the reviews on Amazon for this appear to be fake in my opinion. I have been looking for a high quality low latency GPS NTP node but everything I find seems strung together and wants serial ports which is why I could see these being tempting. My preference would be a board that works in the LTE slot on my firewall but it needs to be reliable and handle a very negative minpoll.

"Our engine has profiled the reviewer patterns and has determined that there is high deception involved."

https://www.fakespot.com/product/ntp2xx-series-gps-based-ntp...

Don't buy it on Amazon

If a phone has GPS, why can't I use a spare phone as a time server? Why do I particularly need this?

I always find it odd to see infrastructure equipment with power cables that can easily be knocked out. I understand the need for flexibility but it would be nice if it was secured somehow.

Can it do PTP (Precision Time Protocol)?

It seems PTP would be useful for network speakers, audio, etc.

Anyone here own one? Experiences?

I yolo ordered a 270, as it ticks a number of boxes I want, I'll update when/if I get it in an estimated 7 business days.

I received mine on Monday and it's been running quite happily and seemingly rock solid sense. I'm pretty happy with the device.

This is the post that drew my attention to it: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisshort.net/post/3ldcd5ou73t2g

If you are on Bluesky you could ask him qs.

I'm not sure he has an HN account, but I'll share this with him as well, and maybe he'll respond.

This is a rock solid device. Dude knows what he's doing. I'd like to get a 250 and add it to the NTP pools but, I love my 200. Rock solid.

I find the stats between the 250 and 270 to be particularly bizarre. The 250 depends on a user-supplied SD Card, while the 270 is plumped out with 512Gb of flash space. And yet, the RAM drops from 512Gb in the 250 to 128Gb in the 270. How does that make any sense??

I mean, sure - install an M.2 slot so users can use full-speed Gen3+ NVMe drives if need be. But don’t sacrifice on-board RAM for soldered-on drive space. That’s just stupid.

Why is this needed?

If you don't have access to Internet.

Even if you do have access, building a set of services in close proximity with each other - yet still working on separate containers or even containers on separate container hosts - still needs a single source of truth where time is concerned. This is especially important if you have time-based transactions with eventual consistency, yet the order of those hundreds to thousands of transactions per second need to be extremely reliable. Having all the parts work off a single known, trusted time server such that the timestamp of all transactions can be absolutely trusted is supremely critical in some applications.

TLS and many encryption standards rely on accurate time. Timing is everything.

Modern communication systems rely on a canonical time source to coordinate the rotation of certificates. A host that cannot determine the time will be denied service, and an attacker who can control the time source can trick hosts into trusting expired certificates.

Since good timekeeping keeps everything else on the rails, having an on-prem stratum 1 server keeps more of your own critical infrastructure under your control.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com