Public access stratum-one and -two NTP servers at mainecoon.com
We provice open access to our public stratum-two servers for users withing reasonable network distance as well as access to our stratum-one server for other sites providing open access stratum-one or -two NTP servers to the Internet at large.  We've been doing this as a pubic service for six years and plan on continuing to do so as long as it doesn't become a pain in the ass.  To help see that it doesn't become a pain in the ass, we have a few simple requests:

  1. Please send a note to time at mainecoon.com with contact information and an indication of which of our server(s) you're planning to use.  We won't spam you, but if we 're going to have a scheduled outage or if you appear to being doing something silly (like peering with us on a DHCP lease) it's nice to be able to contact you.
  2. Please use the cnames for the servers, not their IP addresses or actual host names.  While I don't do it often, I have had cause in the past to change the underlying machines and the use of hard coded IP addresses or real host names will eventually cause you heartburn.
  3. If you're synching only a single machine or if your addresses are assigned via DHCP please poll rather than peer.
  4. Please understand what you're talking about before sending hate mail about UDP port scans running from the NTP servers.  If you subscribe for service and forget to tell your firewall administrator or if you get your IP assignment via DHCP you can end up getting datagrams from our servers.  If you have questions, be nice and ask.  I used to waste hours at a time educating the clueless, but now when the first correspondence I get is a threatening note  (or worse, an in-depth explaination of how one of my *nix servers has been infected by some Windows virus) I send back a polite note suggesting that the sender pull their head out their ass, point them to ntp.org and copy their provider's abuse address. We have more than 1000 distinct consumers (and those are just the ones who bothered to send a note) and tens of thousands of downstream machines; the last thing you want is all of them flaming your inbox because I've decided that your whine-o-gram was the one that made this too much of a pain in the ass and I'm pulling the plug on them.
If it appears that the servers are misbehaving I'd appreciate a note sent to chris at mainecoon.com telling me what you observe.  Note that we only support NTP, not RDATE.