Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism

Fri Apr 7 21:35:48 UTC 2006

GPS.dix.dk service is described as:

DK Denmark GPS.dix.dk (192.38.7.240)
Location: Lyngby, Denmark
Geographic Coordinates: 55:47:03.36N, 12:03:21.48E
Synchronization: NTP V4 GPS with OCXO timebase
Service Area: Networks BGP-announced on the DIX
Access Policy: open access to servers, please, no client use
Contacts: Poul-Henning Kamp (phk at FreeBSD.org)
Note: timestamps better than +/-5 usec.

I think he should use dns views to answer the queries to gps.dix.dk and either:
( a ) answer 127.0.0.1 to all queries from outside his service area
( b ) answer a D-Link IP address to all queries from outside his
service area (which could lead to getting their attention; dunno if
from their engineers or from their lawyers).

Rubens

On 4/7/06, Etaoin Shrdlu <shrdlu at deaddrop.org> wrote:
>
> Well, this is at least marginally on topic, and I think it deserves a
> wider audience. It is written by Poul-Henning Kamp (the affected party).
> Please read it.
>
> http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/
>
> It ends with the following:
>
> Didn't something like this happen before?
>
> Yes, D-Link is not the first vendor to make a hash of the NTP protocol.
> Some years back NetGear products blasted University of Wisconsin off the
> net. I have repeatedly pointed D-Link's lawyer at this case.
> Fortunately, in my case it is not that bad.
>
> The NetGear incident caused the NTP protocol designers to add a "kiss of
> death" option to the Latest (S)NTP standard but D-Links devices does not
> respect that option. I have tried.
>
> --
> "You can't have in a democracy various groups with arms - you have
> to have the state with a monopoly on power," Condoleeza Rice,
> the US secretary of state, said at the end of her two-day visit to
> Baghdad yesterday.             ...No Comment
>
>
>