RIP the man who was the absolute incarnation of XKCD's "one random dude holding up the entire internet". You may never have heard of David Mills, but your entire goddamn world depends on what he did.
@fluxwatcher@memory this article was so good, and so heartbreaking. There's lots of David Mills out there, but they don't get written up like this very often.
> The time servers had once been “well lit in the US and Europe but dark elsewhere in South America, Africa and the Pacific Rim,” Mills wrote, in a 2003 paper. “Today, the Sun never sets or even gets close to the horizon on NTP.” Programmers began to treat the protocol like an assumption—it seemed natural to them that synchronized time was dependably and easily available.
There he worked on synchronizing the clocks of computers connected to #ARPANET, inventing the Network Time Protocol. #NTP
He told The New Yorker in 2022 that he enjoyed working on synchronized time because no one else was working on it, giving him his own "little fief".
In the mid-2000s, Mills turned over full control of the NTP reference implementation to Harlan Stenn.
Mills was the chairman of the Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures Task Force ( #GADS ) and the first chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force.
He invented the DEC LSI-11 based #Fuzzball router that was used for the 56 kbit/s NSFNET (1985), inspired the author of #ping for BSD (1983), and had the first #FTP implementation. He authored numerous #RFCs.
So many people never had the experience of replacing a physical battery (sometimes with soldering tools) on the motherboard because they were asked to provide the current time before the computer would start.
These days, your computer/router/device can start believing it's 1984 and still manage to fix itself by asking the NTP pools, without asking the user to read their watch and type in the date/time.
@memory This brings back memories of troubleshooting AD login issues and realizing the DC wasn't properly updating time and having to manually set NTP servers via w32tm.exe.
@jseggers@memory I’m here to offer the sad news that AD login issues due to time skew were still a problem in 2023. (And are probably still a problem in 2024, but we haven’t had a support ticket about it this year so far, possibly because I put a detailed explanation of why it’s AD’s fault in our support portal knowledge base.)
Microsoft was foolish to try to handle time synchronization with a bunch of interns instead of using the literal decades of research and work that existed when they made that decision.
The fact that they never fixed the problems they created, and the best work-around remains SNTP, is highly shameful.
@aaaabbbb@temptoetiam I mean there are multiple examples of the phenomenon but respectfully and taking nothing away from Pushkarev’s work, ntpd predates core-js by decades.
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