Strange NTP Services–Revealed!

Thanks to Judah Levine of NIST Boulder, we have an official explanation of the strange NTP messages:

Let me explain what you are seeing.
1. The first text is a pseudo-random text designed to confuse automated search engines (note the strategic colons). There are 16 poems and they are sent in a random sequence. The text is derived from a jump-rope game and has no special meaning.

2. The remaining digits provide internal information on the operation of the server and are used for automated remote monitoring. All NIST servers do this.

3. Most of the digits relate to complicated internal parameters. However, the first 3 values after the $ sign are easy to explain the first is the overall state of the server (0=ok,>0=various failures) the second is the time since the server was last calibrated (in sec), and the third is the nominal interval between calibrations (in sec) the remaining parameters have to do with the internal clock control of the system.

Judah Levine
Time and Frequency Divison
NIST Boulder

Thanks Judah!

Trackbacks & Pings

  1. cheesebikini? on 05 Apr 2005 at 11:59 am

    Time-signal Weirdness
    UPDATE: A NIST employee has explained the service described below. This just in from fellow SIMian Matthew Rothenberg:] Here’s something strange to explore. A guy I know recently stumbled across this. time.nist.gov is a standard NTP server, used to sy…

  2. Boing Boing on 05 Apr 2005 at 12:44 pm

    Coded messages on US govt timeserver’s nonstandard port
    A US government timeserver has a bizarre service running on a nonstandard port that will output sweet, random coded jump-rope poems and numbers: % telnet time.nist.gov 78 Trying 192.43.244.18… Connected to time.nist.gov. Escape character is ‘^]’. P…

Comments

  1. Lowtax wrote:

    And you still haven’t credited isnoop with finding the messages in the first place. :waycool:

    Posted 05 Apr 2005 at 12:04 pm

  2. Matthew Rothenberg wrote:

    “Lowtax,” I did not receive the information from “isnoop” or anyone affiliated with the website you linked earlier. If this isnoop was indeed the first person to find the server ports (which considering they have apparently been active since at least 2002, seems somewhat unlikely), then I’m happy to give him credit for that. It had been making its way around the IM/IRC circle in the “hey check out this server” format, I thought it was interesting, so I decided to post about it.

    Posted 05 Apr 2005 at 12:18 pm

  3. Piercing wrote:

    Are all timeservers using same ports 78 and 79?

    Posted 05 Apr 2005 at 3:54 pm

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared.


« Strange NTP Services
Iraqi Coffee »