April 13, 2006 Archives

Not evocative of SARS, *at all*. Demolition stage well underway. Apparently, there will be walls to hammer down tonight or tomorrow, so, avis aux intéressés.

At first, I thought it was an inconsequential Slashdot article (in fact, I omitted to read it on the first pass), so didn't comment on it, even if it underlined one of the stupidest case of technical incompetence to ever come out from a multinational corporation. But the news gathered strength (took a week?) and made it to the BBC tech section.

Basically, the engineers at D-Link, probably second or third brand name for routers and switches, in my mind-as-reference, hard-coded the server names of the main time servers in the world in order to perform whatever task (synchronize device's time, surely). It was probable that most owners of time servers did not care, or even saw the difference (b/c most are run by public institutions - Canada's NRC, for instance). But Denmark's was run by an individual, who made a deal with a local ISP to borrow bandwidth, etc, for free, and made to serve time to a select number (~2000, in article) of orgns only. That is, before those routers from D-Link came on the Internet and flowded the Denmark-based time server with requests; with the expected issues of "who's going to pay for that" with the ISP and the individual who volunteered to provide time.

The bad was probably to query non-D-Link servers for time. To the naive (me), it would've made very simple sense if the company set up some sort of middle-man server to get time from whatever official source, and then have its routers/switches query it. The ugly was surely to hard-code the list of time servers to query. And so, on top of the initial problem, you have the problem of having a problem that is not easily fixed (forcing a firmware upgrade on every single user of a faulty D-Link device).