Time

Update (2023-06-23) I’ve created a page on the DevOps’ish site so that you’ll always have the latest access to what I’m sharing out to social media. The DevOps’ish Firehose is available for your regular consumption (Bonus: there’s an RSS feed) In the last issue of DevOps’ish, I stated, “I’m under explicit doctor’s orders to cut stressors out and do things that bring me more joy… I need to stop doing so much.” For this post, “we” could be a combo of myself, my medical team, and my family. We’ve been monitoring many health metrics through many sensors. (Yes, I should put it all in Grafana, but time). ...

Screensavers, you say? They’re more art than function these days. But, why not inject something either beautiful or useful into this mundane task of screen locking. Yes, it would be best if you still were locking your screen unless you want your four-year-old Slack messaging your co-workers. I have used a hot corner to the lower left to start my screen saver, locking the screen after a few seconds (if I accidentally trigger it). My screensaver will kick in after a healthy 10 minutes (I do work on multiple machines throughout the day). But, it’s a security practice you should never get out of the habit of doing. Lock your screen when you walk away. ...

It’s 2016 (almost 2017) why is the time off on your system clocks? It became apparent to me that there are some folks out there that do not realize their clocks are off for a reason. Julia Evans recently made a graphic about distributed systems that mentioned clock issues and it made me really sad. Photo Credit: Julia Evans We had a saying when I was in the Air Force, “Timing is everything.” We lugged around GPS receivers that hooked up to our bulk and circuit encryption devices so that they would have accurate, consistent time with other encryption devices around the world. ...

Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a very nice feature for networks that utilize multiple devices that have administrators who view logs on a regular basis, web sites that make financial transactions, and employee time clock management systems (these are just a few examples). NTP is designed to keep accurate local time keeping. Having four different times from four different devices for one event that happened once isn’t a good thing. Having every device in your network set to the same time is highly recommended. Computers and routers by themselves use archaic methods for keeping time. NTP ensures the accuracy of time on all devices that use it. For example, the firewall I use at home will automatically e-mail me an alert when there has been an attempted attack or port scan. My home firewall uses NTP to synchronize its time. Therefore, I can then forward that alert to my ISP and the originating ISP. Upon reviewing the alert they can accurately tell by the time the attack/port scan took place and IP address used which one of their users was the perpetrator. ...