[LINK] 'My kingdom for an 11th bit'

[Marghanita da Cruz]

OK I will ask Kim,

What is NTP & what are Stratum servers?

Marghanita

On 7/20/26 15:04, Kim Holburn wrote:
> It wasn't just failure to replace, or even failure to upgrade, it was 
> making a dodgy Stratum 3 server into a Stratum 1 server and not having 
> enough stratum 1 servers, and probably not sharing their NTP systems 
> with outside systems.
>
> Beyond that, no-one seems to have had any decent NTP expertise or in 
> depth understanding of just how important NTP is to the functioning of 
> their network.
>
> On 20/7/2026 1:44 pm, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
>> Reddit says 20 year old server not upgraded. Staff who knew about 
>> server sacked 10 years ago:
>>
>>> This is just classic big telco. Reliant on unmanaged systems built 
>>> by people fired 10+ years ago.
>> More at 
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1uvz7ns/telstra_australias_largest_telco_blames_outage_on/
>>
>>> Failure to replace a 20-year-old server worth $30,000 could cost 
>>> Telstra $30 million in fines, with executives set to face a Senate 
>>> inquiry this week as the repercussions of last week’s outage – which 
>>> blocked Triple Zero calls and disrupted payment and train services – 
>>> continue to pile up.
>> More at ACS Information Age 
>> https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/telstra-outage-blamed-on-known-bug-in-obsolete-server.html
>>
>> Marghanita
>>
>>
>> On 7/20/26 13:13, David wrote:
>>> And it is, too. However can anyone explain why modern 
>>> telecommunications infrastructure sometimes requires timings 
>>> accurate to nanoseconds? Surely this is an architectural flaw. I'd 
>>> have thought signal propagation variability, and even relativistic 
>>> time changes, would be much greater. From the article:
>>>> Modern telecommunications and computing networks depend on all 
>>>> nodes across the network sharing an extremely accurate sense of the 
>>>> current time. Not accurate to the minute or the second, but 
>>>> accurate to fractions of a microsecond – even down to billionths of 
>>>> a second (nanoseconds) in some extreme cases.
>>
-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
Telephone: 0414-869202
Email:  marghanita at ramin.com.au
Website: http://ramin.com.au