• Bert Glanstron (unregistered)

    Dear Paul,

    In case you can't tell, this is a grown-up place. The fact that you insist on continuously querying my IP address for NTP data clearly shows that you're too young and too stupid to be using NTP.

    Go away and grow up.

    Sincerely, Bert Glanstron

  • (cs) in reply to TRWTF: KOD
    TRWTF: KOD:
    Good god, the quality of the content is falling faster than a lead-loaded Dodge Ram that just drove off the Grand Canyon.
    "Boy, that sure sank fast!"

    "Like a rock!"

  • (cs)

    Is it still too soon to say that it would fall faster than a plane piloted by JFK Jr?

  • Pepe Le Pew (unregistered) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    Is it still too soon to say that it would fall faster than a plane piloted by JFK Jr?

    Nope, not at all.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    Is it still too soon to say that it would fall faster than a plane piloted by JFK Jr?
    Only if it isn't true.
  • (cs) in reply to Fritz, a.k.a. Fritzo
    Fritz:
    TGV:
    A dark and stormy night in Norrland's Helsingfors University lay ahead of Paulo. He had just received an angry email from an irate professor whose temper had run high as a falcon flying very high after an irritating incident on one of Paulo's servers, and he received it only 7 hours before the end of his working day.

    "Dear admin,"

    the letter began ominously. "What a baka gaijin," thought Paulo, for he had explicitly told everyone to call him by his true name Paulo-San.

    "By accident I deleted a file from exp39/data. I meant to deleted spss.tab.12a.dat, but I mistyped and deleted spss.tab.12q.dat."

    Kuso, thought Rono, Paulo's headmate winged baby dragon kitsune (kitsune means fox). Will they never learn to write e-mails in kanji? But the email continued.

    "I understood that you make a backup every night. The file was created two days ago. Could you restore it please?"

    Paulo's head was spinning. Not literally but figuratively. Did this white devil really believe that he had the desire to restore a file? The user knew clearly less about system administrators than about computers.

    "The file was the result of a lot of work, so I would really appreciate it. Kind regards".

    Sigh. Paulo grabbed his keyboard, typed the restore command, and continued with his Naruto slash fiction. "If only my kokoro wish came true, all these e-mails would cease and I would be free to pursue my true passion of making bonzai fedoras."

    "bonzai fedoras". And there's the amusing spello that makes this submizzion complete.

    "Bansai!" exclaimed Paulo. "No more work today? That's bonsa," he continued, experimenting with Auzzie slang.

  • PITA (unregistered)

    Google update says "What's wrong with that?"

  • Johnzo (unregistered) in reply to Bruce W
    Bruce W:
    Todd Lewis:
    TRWTF: KOD:
    Who authors TDWTF?... PATHETIC.
    That would be you. And me. And the rest of us. Want to raise the bar? Help yourself.
    Agreed. If you want better stories, submit some! I recently sent in my fourth submission. I write them well from the beginning to reduce the amount of "creative license" the staff writers need to do.

    So, what's 'Gertrude' really like?

  • teambob (unregistered)

    They used a time-based scheduler (cron) to run a command to fix the time. Does anyone find this weird?

    As suggested by others, permanently running ntpd would be the best solution

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Over the last year many TDWTF posts are not so much WTF, but just bugs.... plain, simple oversights or mistakes that any human could/would make. This is the latest boring "aren't i such a clever sysadmin to notice you left -e out of 'dd ibs=1 count=100M if=/dev/zero of=allzero.dat'.. hehehe" stories

  • (cs) in reply to Johnzo
    Johnzo:
    So, what's 'Gertrude' really like?
    The programming language? Just check it out here!
  • Ema Nymton (unregistered)

    I hate to poke technical holes, but for as long as I can recall, you can't run concurrent copies of ntpd because it has to bind to *:123 before it can perform any queries (ntpd uses udp/123 as its source port).

  • Dominic (unregistered)

    I want to hear more about this UNIVAC that ambled down its ancestors' path.

  • (cs)

    Okay, the only WTF I see here is that Bob actually had the time and inclination to contact the server owner rather than just block the offending machine from his network.

    I used to contact other systems owners when we found repeated attacks coming from their machines. When this turned into something that was taking an hour plus each day to do we stopped that and instituted various tools to simply auto block the offending IPs based on a rule set for a period of time. This seems to work just fine.

  • (cs) in reply to LazerFX
    LazerFX:
    Anyone get the feeling that this is like something out of Finding Nemo - only instead of 'mine', the birds are all saying 'time'?

    No? Just me?

    Oh well.

    Captcha: suscipere - that's a very suscipere cron job.

    I've seen that movie about 100 times and always thought the gulls said "Mate!" Googling has shown that it is officially "mine" but the producers haven't ruled it out...

  • Fritz, a.k.a. Fritzo (unregistered) in reply to TGV
    TGV:
    Fritz:
    "If only my kokoro wish came true, all these e-mails would cease and I would be free to pursue my true passion of making bonzai fedoras."
    I give you five rings!

    Thanks, TGV. Thantgvs.

  • pouzzler (unregistered)

    How is that a 'curious perversion in information technology', pray tell? (or interesting?)

  • Fritz, a.k.a. Fritzo (unregistered) in reply to pouzzler
    pouzzler:
    How is that a 'curious perversion in information technology', pray tell? (or interesting?)

    You're supposed to have a wank on your father's underwear while looking at 3D CGIof Bea Arthur's taint while reading the article. I'm amaged you didn't know this!

  • Donny L (unregistered)

    I don't know why people insist on continuing to use NTP when you can get a $30 GPS receiver and have the accurate time reliably without reliance on a network connection or someone else to run a server for you.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to teambob
    teambob:
    They used a time-based scheduler (cron) to run a command to fix the time. Does anyone find this weird?

    As suggested by others, permanently running ntpd would be the best solution

    shrug no, not really. How else would you determine when to check the authoritative time source? Since the point is to make the local time source as accurate as reasonably possible to expect, it's not really a WTF to use it for this purpose. And how else would you, anyway? Permanently running ntpd would be the "right" solution but it's no different really - it still has to use the local time source to decide when it's been long enough before resynchronising with the authoritative time source.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Donny L
    Donny L:
    I don't know why people insist on continuing to use NTP when you can get a $30 GPS receiver and have the accurate time reliably without reliance on a network connection or someone else to run a server for you.
    I'm actually thinking about getting something of the sort (I reason that it'd probably be easier than trying to get the higher-ups in IT to punch a hole through the firewall for NTP). Do you have any recommendations on what sort of GPS device will work and how it's installed on a network, or a networked PC?
  • John Max (unregistered)

    Paul's family has a long, proud tradition of working in IT.

    and Paul been the black sheep of his family due to his inexperienced and arrogance in IT.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    Donny L:
    I don't know why people insist on continuing to use NTP when you can get a $30 GPS receiver and have the accurate time reliably without reliance on a network connection or someone else to run a server for you.
    I'm actually thinking about getting something of the sort (I reason that it'd probably be easier than trying to get the higher-ups in IT to punch a hole through the firewall for NTP). Do you have any recommendations on what sort of GPS device will work and how it's installed on a network, or a networked PC?
    And by this I mean, serial, USB, or Ethernet connection, is it plugged directly into the network or does it require a host PC, will it run on Windows or Linux, etc. Not "hold my hand please", I just want to get a general idea of what sort of compatibility issues I might run into.
  • (cs) in reply to Zemm
    Zemm:
    LazerFX:
    Anyone get the feeling that this is like something out of Finding Nemo - only instead of 'mine', the birds are all saying 'time'?

    No? Just me?

    Oh well.

    Captcha: suscipere - that's a very suscipere cron job.

    I've seen that movie about 100 times and always thought the gulls said "Mate!" Googling has shown that it is officially "mine" but the producers haven't ruled it out...

    I've seen it once, but wasn't drunk enough to think that they were saying anything besides "mine."

  • Scourge of Programmers! (unregistered)

    I don't see a WTF in this article.

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered)

    http://shikan.org/bjones/Usenet.Hist/Nethist/0027.html

    Unfortunately I can't find the original posting.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic

    Actually, the problem is the local clock is too crappy that the drift cannot be fixed simply running ntpd as daemon. According to the documentation, ntpd can only fix clock drifts up to 500ppm (0.5ms drift per second, or 43.2 seconds per day). The article already said the local clock has a drift of 1-2 min per day, which obvious cannot be fixed by ntpd deamon. The only way to sync clock would be periodically running "ntpd -g -x -q". It seems that Paul in the article missed the -q option.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    Executive summary: Idiot doesn't know how to configure ntpd, gets snarky email from the owner of the upstream time server.

    Alternative interpretation: Writer doesn't know that ntpd can cope quite nicely with the advertised problem without being multi-launched, libels the submitter.

    Seriously, nptd knows how to cope with drifty local clocks, and even has an automatic mode for recovering from the initial unknown driftiness. No multilaunch is needed.

    Sigh.

    (forgotten to quote the original comment...)

    Actually, the problem is the local clock is too crappy that the drift cannot be fixed simply running ntpd as daemon. According to the documentation, ntpd can only fix clock drifts up to 500ppm (0.5ms drift per second, or 43.2 seconds per day). The article already said the local clock has a drift of 1-2 min per day, which obvious cannot be fixed by ntpd deamon. The only way to sync clock would be periodically running "ntpd -g -x -q". It seems that Paul in the article missed the -q option.

  • meh (unregistered) in reply to Scourge of Programmers!
    Scourge of Programmers!:
    I don't see a WTF in this article.

    It's the article itself.

  • Yeah, right (unregistered) in reply to nonpartisan
    nonpartisan:
    TRWTF: KOD:
    Good god, the quality of the content is falling faster than a lead-loaded Dodge Ram that just drove off the Grand Canyon.
    "Boy, that sure sank fast!"

    "Like a rock!"

    Nice!

  • Javelin (unregistered) in reply to ratchet freak
    ratchet freak:
    or he should have fixed the clock of the server...
    How many programmers would it take to fix the clock of the server?

    "That sounds like a hardware issue."

  • Ema Nymton (unregistered) in reply to Donny L

    There are a couple of reasons. The first is that GPS receivers don't work in most data centers without running an external antenna. Most data centers won't or can't do that. The same applies to CDMA signals.

    The second is that having a clock in tight agreement with the world is often less important than having all the clocks on your network in tight agreement with each other. The only way to do that is to have a local time server.

  • Mark (unregistered) in reply to Ema Nymton

    Modern GPS receivers are sensitive enough to work well enough completely indoors (they'll just be far less accurate at position, but that's not relevant for this application), and there's no reason why one can't be plugged into a "local time server".

  • (cs)
    rate of several queries per second
    If that constitutes a DOS for a server that's part of pool.ntp.org, then perhaps it's time to get rid of said server, because it's a joke.
  • (cs) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    Actually, the problem is the local clock is too crappy that the drift cannot be fixed simply running ntpd as daemon. According to the documentation, ntpd can only fix clock drifts up to 500ppm (0.5ms drift per second, or 43.2 seconds per day).
    Given that it's a one-liner change, I'd take advantage of actually having the source available, change it to work on the bad machine, document it in the IT log for the server, and call it a day.
  • Typo Detector (unregistered)

    Kiss of Death, not Knife of Dreams.

  • (cs)

    Had a similar experience. Our service was supposed to connect to remote database, pillage some data from it, and, if all was ok, silently terminate itself.

    If all was not ok(which, for reasons outside of our control, was most of the time)... it had to run a cycle of retries(up to 15) until either all data was received or until it valiantly died trying. Except... there's been a slight oversight on my part and retry counter was being reset on each iteration...

    Enter cron. Each half-hour a new instance of the service was spawned with the assumption that the previous iteration is long gone and buried.

    Enter 20 hrs network disconnection period ... by the time the connection was fixed, ~40 instances of data hungry mobsters mercilessly attacked data source effectively DDOSing it.

    In the end, the app was refactored to run full time with timed queries instead of being restarted each 30 minutes.

  • Jenda (unregistered)

    Passive-aggressive? Sorry? The owner of the DoSed machine had been very very nice.

  • Neil (unregistered) in reply to clively
    clively:
    Okay, the only WTF I see here is that Bob actually had the time and inclination to contact the server owner rather than just block the offending machine from his network.
    So you should just DoS the other members of the pool?

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