[Discuss] NTP Gone Crazy?

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

I remember a story from the early days of the internet (maybe ARPANET at 
that point) when there was a bug in NTP and, for a time, it was most of 
the traffic on the internet...

Anyway, last night my internets at home were working normally, but this 
morning they were crappy.  I went out and when I got home they were 
still crappy.  I assumed it was Verizon's fault, what with their 
unmaintained copper wires...but that wasn't it Verizon this time.

My NTP daemon went crazy.

I have an ancient (Ubuntu 7.04) basement server that does very basic 
things, roughly:

  - DHCP server,
  - QEMU host for three little virtual machines, and
  - NTP client/server.

When I called my DSL provider to complain I was told that I was pegging 
my upstream bandwidth.  Huh??

After poking around I finally isolated it: NTP.  Turn it on and my 
first-hop-ping jumps from a dozen-ish ms to several hundred-ish ms. Turn 
it off and the ping times fall back to dozen-ish ms.

I tried commenting out half my "server" entries in my /etc/ntp.conf 
file: same thing.  I tried commenting out all of the "server" entries 
and still the same thing.

Am I just dying of bit rot?  Something gone bad in my ntp binary??

Ideas?


Thanks,

-kb, the Kent who figures it is a sign from God to build a new basement 
server.