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# System prepended metadata

title: NTP update (November 2022)

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# NTP update (November 2022)

## NTS

We've started work on NTS key exchange, and did some exploratory work on the parsing of NTS packets and the crypto that is involved.

## David at IETF

David was at IETF 2022 in London and discussed various NTPv5 topics and implementation issues. He worked on experimental NTPv5 implementation during the hackathon with other working group members. NTPv5 is probably a couple of years out, but heading in a promising direction. See [here](https://twitter.com/tweedegolfbv/status/1594992478066728961).


## Our server in the NTP pool

Our server in the NTP pool https://www.ntppool.org/a/tweedegolf is now stable, and is accurate to within 1-2ms. We discovered that the machine that we use could not quite handle the traffic that the NTP pool was sending. After decreasing the load (though it still averages ??? packets per second), performance is now as expected.

## Stability improvements

We've been working on future stability improvements, specifically a non-standards compliant mode. Our current implementation is standard-compliant, but the standard is known to provide suboptimal performance/stability. 

We expect to add these improvements before the end of the NTS milestone.

## Pool peer support

In addition to having a server in the NTP pool, we can now also configure clients to use the NTP pool's pool functionality (rather than picking specific NTP servers by hand). 

## Monitoring 

Our monitoring now outputs in fully compliant OpenMetrics prometheus format and also includes statistics about the number of packets received and processed for the NTP server.

The new `ntp-metrics-exporter` binary provides an http endpoint that can be used with prometheus.

## Planning the audit

We are working with a pentester of Radically Open Security to prepare for the audit that we are planning for March 2023.

# Planned work

In December, for milestone 3 (NTS) we plan to work on:

- fully implement key exchange
- work on NTS packet parsing and en/decryption

See https://github.com/memorysafety/ntpd-rs/issues (NTS milestone).
