Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Transparency Report #017: NTP Service Stats!
What are Transparency Reports?
As a community‑operated and governed virtual internet exchange, FurrIX maintains
a commitment to open and honest communication with its members. From time to
time, operational work may occur that affects the exchange or its supporting infrastructure.
When this happens, the FurrIX operations team publishes a transparency report to
ensure all members remain informed. As a hobbyist‑rooted vIX, we aim to keep
communication clear, accessible and practical to the best of our ability.
What Happened
The volunteers at FurrIX have been working on finalizing the NTP deployment and getting
it to a point that we do not have to keep a hawk’s eye on what is does. This means we
have gotten internally tooling working for us and webpage goodies for you all!
Also, we have done our best to extend the life of PHYTWO and our LibreNMS instance
a little bit longer, but we are running out of useful life on that box.
Changes to the Exchange
LibreNMS:
- RRDCached:
Our volunteers setup rrdcached on the LibreNMS server to give us a little bit of a break
when it comes to the performance of our monitoring stack. Let’s look at the reality, the
PHYTWO control plane and backup server is old. It needs to be retired and something
else put in it’s place, but budget and small little tweaks are keeping it alive…somehow.
- Board Discussion:
The FurrIX board is in conversation about retiring the current PHYTWO box and moving
it to a purpose built, much newer box that would be backed by a fibre connection that
actually exceeds what FurrIX itself is capable of. This would mean that one of the volunteers
would have physical control of that box, so some new policy and guidelines have to be made.
NTP service:
- LibreNMS Enrollment:
The NTP VM is enrolled in our network monitoring, meaning our volunteers will now get
Discord and email alerts if things start to lag, go over network thresholds or drift.
- Status Graphs:
You guys love stats. We love stats. Everyone loves stats.
The FurrIX website now shows averages of the packets per second in and out for the
NTP service for one hour, six hours, one day and one week. Enjoy, nerds!
Are Exchange Operations Affected?
No. These changes were done early enough in the day that our operations were not
bothered in the slightest and the fabric didn’t even notice the few things that did get
restarted service wise.