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Participating in the NTS pool

Network Time Security (NTS) is an extension to the NTP protocol aimed at securing the communication between NTP clients and servers. An experimental pool for servers supporting NTS has recently been set up at https://experimental.ntspooltest.org/

NTPD-rs versions newer than 1.7.0-alpha.20251003 support being added to this pool. This guide will assume you are running a version more recent than this, and have already setup an NTS server using the instructions in our NTS guide.

Adding your server

To add an NTS server to the pool, on the pool website add the domain name of the server on the Time sources page after logging in. The pool will give you an authentication key the pool will use to authenticate itself to your NTS server. This key will need to be added to the ntpd-rs configuration to allow the pool to handle NTS key exchange connections for your server.

To add this key, modify the ntpd-rs configuration at /etc/ntpd-rs/ntp.toml, adding to the [[nts-ke-server]] section the following:

accepted-pool-authentication-tokens = ["<YOUR TOKEN HERE>"]

After restarting your server, it will start accepting requests from the pool, and you will start to see your score on the pool website increase. When this happens, your server is succesfully configured for use in the pool.