NTP’s maintenance has slowed to a crawl and it’s been the subject of numerous DDoS attacks. It’s time to consider a change.
Doesn’t anyone really know what time it is? Does anyone really care? It made a fine song lyric for the band Chicago, but it’s no way to run the internet. On the net, everything needs to know the precise time to within a microsecond and the tool we use to do that with is Network Time Protocol (NTP).
NTP provides the internet’s heartbeat. Without it, servers and PCs wouldn’t know what time it is. That, in turn, would mean backups would fail, financial transactions would go awry, and many fundamental network services wouldn’t work. The primary time-keepers of the net are stratum-0 devices, i.e., atomic clocks. NTP connects these to other devices, which in turn set the time for everything online.