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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

You are a kindred spirit. I have: 2 pi NTP servers - one running a GPS hat + PPS wired up, one using a USB gps receiver. a "workhorse" pi - 2 wired ds18b20 temperature sensors, cron jobs, email generators, weather page generator, connectivity monitor. One pi running piubos + nextcloud. One pi running as a clock. One pi running as a wireless temperature receiver. a few floating pis running media center or retropie or other things... just swap in the right USB stick and run.

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Good souls. I took the time to setup a highly accurate stratum-1 not server only to find my ISP permanently blocks udp 123.

Can a VPN pass that, further loading up the Pi?

A vpn won’t help you with inbound, since any packets marked as destination port 123 are simply dropped. That time server is simply for my own purposes now and can’t contribute to the pools.

I was meaning a remote VPN that the Pi connects to. Possibly a bit overkill.

Could use a pi to automate emailing isp staff every day nagging them about the blocked port.

Just curious, what kind of cron jobs are you running?

He told it: random ones.

I just went to look at my crontab again. Some highlights (lowlights?):

- Turning lights on/off around the house, because I found cron to be a more reliable scheduling agent that the one built-into my Wave software when I first set it up.

- Testing network performance (ping times to various locations)

- Fetching a mail account and processing the messages for an automation I have setup for some things.

- Updating online weather services with data from my weather station.

- Kicking off data gathering/update jobs.

You know, cron is simple... but so directly useful.

I moved some stuff out of cron into systemd and although it worked, it was over-complicated in an infuriating way.

I realize systemd is useful, but the implementation is like trying to navigate through a teenager's bedroom trying to find something.

Maybe there should be a help group for people like us?

We need help. Possibly ways to acquire new models pis early, or get volume discounts.

Just curious, what kind of firewalls are you running?

pfSense [on Netgate appliance] for me.

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