Strog
April 7th, 2006, 12:36
http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/

Apparently D-Link has been pulling from several NTP servers without permissions and in violation of the terms of these servers. This is an open letter from Poul-Henning Kamp (FreeBSD core member for years) about D-Link's usage of his server. It is intended for Danish BGP routers since there's nothing in place for this on a national level.

"I'm publishing this open letter in a last ditch attempt to get a responsible person at D-link to shoulder their responsibility.

I can't afford to sue D-Link. It seems that they have managed to arrange their corporate affairs so that there is no way I can sue them here in Denmark, but will have to do it either in Taiwan or USA. Needless to say, I can't afford that.

So unless D-Link comes to their senses, I guess the outcome is that I lose a lot of money and the gps.dix.dk server will cease to offer a public service to the Danish part of the internet.

That is why the title of this open letter is titled "NTP vandalism".

So if you, dear reader, know somebody who works at D-Link, please point them at this open letter. If you don't, feel free to spread news of it through other channels, my only hope is that eventually somebody in D-Link management becomes embarrased enough to do the honourable thing."

Unregistered
April 9th, 2006, 02:47
He's posted a sequel

D-link is abusing all the Stratum 1 NTP servers.

I've bought my last D-link product!

Unregistered
April 12th, 2006, 18:38
The most recent issue of ;login: (http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/) has a similar article (Unwanted HTTP: Who Has the Time?) where a college's web server was being used to set the time in a software package (http://www.kaska.demon.co.uk/). This brought their web server down once a threshold was hit, but that company actually worked with them to resolve the issue.

A somewhat related problem happens everytime someone uses a domain like 'server.com' in an example, instead of 'example.com' which exists for that purpose. People out there reading the example will try 'server.com' in their configs and may end up causing more traffic to 'server.com'.

Loop
April 12th, 2006, 22:53
Same thing happened with Netgear devices a couple of years ago, they did fix it though.