NTP, it's easy as 123

So much magic happens over port 123/udp, and even though some people have pointed out that the NTP time scale is fundamentally stupid, it's still pretty darn good.

To quote the theme song from my favorite made-for-TV movies, the TekWar trilogy, they say the devil's in the details and I know what they mean.

David Mills, the guy who created NTP, has actually pointed out that NTP timings on a server can be used to determine when a case fan has died in the system. Excess heat reduces a system clock's accuracy, so a clock that requires more and bigger adjustments to stay accurate is possibly experiencing fan component failure. Higher heat, lower accuracy. You can see this right in your logs.

To this extent, I'm curious to know if running distributed.net on my workstation is killing my average daily offset. For the next few days, I'm going to run without dnetc turned on (or, in my case, automatically starting up at 09:00 along with SSH and WinVNC). If my offset drops to a crazy-low value, I'll know that a hot and bothered CPU is a major culprit in hurting your SNTP network.