A long time ago I wondered why home routers didn't run (or include, at least) an instance of ntpd in broadcast mode on the internal interface that clients could sync to.
You can run an NTP instance on your own, of course, and point clients at it via DHCP options but I thought something like that would be kinda handy for easily keeping time synchronized across all one's devices.
That doesn't really fit this use case, of course, but it reminded me of it. With more and more "home devices" being network-enabled, something like that would be extremely useful (and could put to an end "12 o'clock flashers").
Why run your own instance when you can just flog the crap out of the public pool for free? [1]
Digging into the internals of a few "high end" consumer modem/routers, I wouldn't trust any manufacturer to provide a secure ntpd, so we'd probably just end up with NTP amplification attacks [2] on a Mirai scale.
Mine does, but I suppose we're talking about standard CPE devices. They indeed only do the minimum and are often locked down to prevent you from adding or changing anything. All in the name of stability and customer experience. The reality is, of course, that it is way too expensive to support millions of home users when they start relying on the CPE for more services or start changing the settings.
You can run an NTP instance on your own, of course, and point clients at it via DHCP options but I thought something like that would be kinda handy for easily keeping time synchronized across all one's devices.
That doesn't really fit this use case, of course, but it reminded me of it. With more and more "home devices" being network-enabled, something like that would be extremely useful (and could put to an end "12 o'clock flashers").