More FAQs will be added here as we discover that they are FAQs.
Why NTPsec?
NTPsec was forked from NTP Classic 4.3.34 in mid-2015 after many installations of NTP Classic were repeatedly exploited as amplifiers in distributed denial-of-service attacks.
This failure didn’t happen at random. NTP Classic has long neglected open-source best practices, and stagnated as a result. The code needed to be fixed, and the development practice around it reformed.
Why should we believe your security/reliability claims?
The NTPsec team combines the expertise of senior developers from NTP Classic, the GPSD project, and the RTEMS Project.
GPSD has an exceptional record of reliability and security over a decade of literally billions of deployments in mobile and embedded systems ranging from smartphones through life-critical navigation systems to military and aerospace applications. You rely on it every time you use Google Maps.
RTEMS is the real-time operating system used in deep-space missions. It is ultra-reliable because it has to be; there’s no on-site tech support a million miles from Earth.
Applying that GPSD and RTEMS experience to NTP combines the best in modern high-reliability software engineering with the proven excellence of the NTP Classic core algorithms.
Will NTPsec fully interoperate with NTP Classic?
NTPsec already fully interoperates with NTP Classic. They use the same protocols and the same time adjustment algorithms. User-visible differences are minor, and consist mostly of obsolete code being dropped and a few tools renamed to reduce NTPsec’s footprint in global namespace.
Why do these web pages look so 1990s?
Because that simple look is good for people with visual impairments, and as a tribute to Dr. David Mills, the original architect of NTP who is himself visually impaired. Dr. Mills has very particular ideas about Web visuals, and this site is carefully styled to resemble his NTP documentation pages.
