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Comments (139)

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  arn3n
  Wind gusts were reaching 125 MPH in Boulder county, if anyone’s curious. A lot of power was shut off preemptively to prevent downed power lines from starting wildfires. Energy providers gave warning to locals in advance. Shame that NIST’s backup generator failed, though.
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  glkindlmann
  Of the various internet .+P, NTP is one I never learned about as a student, so now I'm looking at its web page [1] by its creator David L. Mills (1938-2024). I've found one video of him giving a retrospective of his extensive internet work; he talks about NTP at 34:51 [2] and later at 56:26 [3].[1] https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html[2] https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?si=WXJCV_v0qlZQK3m4&t=2092[3] https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?si=K80ThtYZWcOAxUga&t=3386
• themafia
  > Facility operators anticipated needing to shutdown the heat-exchange infrastructure providing air cooling to many parts of the building, including some internal networking closets. As a result, many of these too were preemptively shutdown with the result that our group lacks much of the monitoring and control capabilities we ordinarily haveHaving a parallel low bandwidth, low power, low waste heat network infrastructure for this suddenly seems useful.
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  Animats
  NIST campus status: Due to elevated fire risk and a power outage for the Boulder area, the DOC Boulder Labs campus is CLOSED on December 19 for onsite business and no public access is permitted; previously approved accesses are revoked.[1]WWV still seems to be up, including voice phone access.NIST Boulder has a recorded phone number for site status, and it says that as of December 20, the site is closed with no access.NIST's main web site says they put status info on various social media accounts, but there's no announcement about this.[1] https://www.nist.gov/campus-status
• samch
  Can anybody speak to the current best practices around running underground power lines? I see these types of articles about above-ground distribution systems from time-to-time, particularly in California. I feel lucky that my area has underground power, but that was installed back in the 1980s. Would it be prohibitively expensive for Boulder’s utility provider to move to underground distribution? I can’t help but think it could be worth the cost to reduce wildfire risk and offer more reliable service.
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  cdfuller
  Can anybody expand on the implications of this?Being unfamiliar with it, it's hard to tell if this is a minor blip that happens all the time, or if it's potentially a major issue that could cause cascading errors equal to the hype of Y2K.
• sgnelson
  FYI, this was posted a month ago when discussing thermal effects of clock drift. I thought it was quite interesting view of what the WWVB location looks like:https://jila.colorado.edu/news-events/articles/spare-timeDiscussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46042946
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  sgnelson
  One question I have is did DOGE decisions have anything to do with this? Because I know they took knives to NIST.
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  amelius
  This makes me wonder, if you take the average time of all wristwatches on the planet, accounting for timezones and throwing out outliers, how close would you get to NTP time?And how many randomly chosen wristwatches would you need to get anything reasonable?
• 8organicbits
  The referenced mailing list is this Google Group (https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/internet-time-se...) which has some other posts about this incident.
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  DamonHD
  So far I think I'm still seeing one of them in my peers list for my public-ish NTP server: remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter ============================================================================== +time-e-b.nist.g .NIST. 1 u 372 1024 377 125.260 1.314 0.280
• crazydoggers
  Status of NIST time servers:https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi
• gilrain
  It’d be a good idea to protect our infrastructure from the climate we created.It’s just a good idea, though, not a greedy one… so it won’t happen.
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  lovich
  This was an NTP 0 server right? What is the actual failback mechanism when that level of NTP server fails?This is some level of eldritch magic that I am aware of, but not familiar with but am interested in learning.
• jb1991
  This is terrible. It’s always sad to hear about things like this.
• qmarchi
  Man, they're having a hell of a time up in Boulder.
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  renewiltord
  Well, where did NTP at NIST last put it? Did they look there?
• keepamovin
  For future reference of civilization: if a facility is critical, it must have a SMR.