[njt]

> someone complained about NTP issues with traffic passing through TATA and they were told to make their devices stratum 0 or something

Not saying your summary of that thread is wrong, I just wanted to expand a bit to maybe clarify:

    - someone posted to NANOG about issues with their (European) servers reaching 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org
    - they noticed they were being routed through Tata (AS6453)
    - they mentioned that their other servers (e.g. in Africa) had no issues
    - they posted to NANOG to ask about this
    - they thought it was a routing or FreeBSD issue (they later posted about the issue to a FreeBSD list as well)

So AFAICT, the correct response was posted about a day and a half (~42 hours) later:

    - the NTP pool uses GeoDNS to map clients to servers
    - the OP's server IP address was incorrectly geolocated to Mauritius
    - the Mauritius zone in the pool has only one server
    - so the OP would only ever get that IP as an answer

The short-term fix was to use a different pool address (e.g. europe.pool.ntp.org), and the responder also mentioned that the NTP pool folks were working to fix the problem.

Full thread here:

    https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2023-August/222706.html

Now the interesting part of that thread was that shortly after (~4 hours) the OP posted about their problem, someone replied and recommended that they setup their own GPS-based NTP network.

From there, that sub-thread was mostly about NTP attacks and GPS security and mounting receivers on top of datacenter buildings and such.

Counting up the messages (if my mail client's threading capabilities are to be trusted), of the 94 or so total messages in the thread, 79 (84%) of the messages were in that GPS-related subthread, and only 15 messages responded to the OPs issue directly.

I didn't really see this as a failing of NANOG per-se, it's just a public mailing list and some folks went on a nerd sniping tangent (cf. XKCD #356).