DO NOT run scheduled requests to a public server at the top of the hour, pick a random minute. The worst victims of this problem are community NTP servers - at every hour and especially 00:00:00 UTC, the traffic spike is just impressive.
@niconiconi Pro tip: If you run an NTP server, shut it down for five minutes around midnight for maintenance.
That will teach them.
@wakame
No, it will not teach anything. This has been discussed to some extend in the public NTP server community. My take-away: There is nothing short-term that can be done to rectify the situation.
There's a "kiss of death" packet defined in the protocol, which you can send to badly programmed rogue clients (it contains no usable time info), or you can ignore their requests. Either will cause many to simply send more requests without exponential backoff.
@niconiconi
@niconiconi @dj3ei It was more meant as a humorous remark, not an actual solution.
I personally know too many people who would rather copy/paste fifteen bad stackoverflow examples than to read even the synopsis of a standards document...
But I just head a great idea for a cyberpunk work of fiction where covert members of the FOSS army sneak into companies and other places housing old hardware and destroy (or even update) them.