This is the history of the NTPsec project, told in chapters.
The first telling ended on October 10th, 2017, with the words: "The rest of the story has yet to be written." We watched 1.0.0 go out on IRC, and then we went back to work. What follows is some of what happened next - the years of a project growing up, of a big idea shipped, of a long quiet plateau, of a death in the family of the Internet, and of a return.
It is a less dramatic story than the founding. Founding a project is all crisis and rescue; keeping one alive for a decade is mostly discipline, and discipline does not make headlines. But it is the truer half of any engineering story, and it is worth writing down before the details fade out of the mailing-list archives.
Chapters
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Chapter 0: How NTPsec came to be (2013-2017)
The prehistory, the DDoS scare, the NSF rescue, the fork, the great cleanup, and the road to 1.0.0. -
Chapter 1: After first ship (2017-2018)
Settling into adult life: three quarters of the old code gone, the Mozilla/Cure53 audit, and a project at its busy, healthy peak. -
Chapter 2: Network Time Security (2019)
The "Good Secure Times" sprint, interop with Ostfalia, and shipping working NTS a year before the standard was finished. -
Chapter 3: The standard lands (2020)
The key-exporter break, port 4460, RFC 8915, and the 1.2.0 release. -
Chapter 4: The long plateau (2021-2023)
Maintenance, the Go/Rust dream, chrony winning the defaults, and Debian retiring ntp for ntpsec. -
Chapter 5: Father Time (2024)
David L. Mills dies, the memorial, and the quietest year in the project’s history. -
Chapter 6: Embers, and a return (2025-2026)
1.2.4, NTS for the pool, the list waking up, and a return to active participation.