One of my favorite sayings is "never suspect a conspiracy, that which can be explained by incompetence". This is likely an accidental side effect of something else they've done because unless they are now trying to sell you some kind of Bell branded time-sync service, I can't think of any business reason why they would do this intentionally.
Although, one thing I can think of is, perhaps there is a whole lot of unsecured NTP on their network being actively exploited?
Might be worth going through the pain of opening a ticket to see if you can get an official answer. I believe the CRTC regulations prevent them from arbitrarily manipulating, blocking, or shaping the network traffic without disclosing what they are doing.
John
On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 4:55 AM Trevor Cordes trevor@tecnopolis.ca wrote:
On 2019-01-25 Trevor Cordes wrote:
Looks like chrony (and others) lets you specify src port, but I'm loathe to uproot the system I know because Bell is braindead. (MTS didn't use to block it, and block-happy Shaw does not block it.)
Epiphany moment: iptables can probably solve this. 20 minutes later:
iptables -t mangle -A OUTPUT -o $iext -p udp --sport 123 --dport 123 -j MARK --set-mark 30 iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p udp -m mark --mark 30 -j SNAT --to-source :60000-61000
Works perfectly! ntpd now syncs with peers. ntpdate doesn't need -u. I don't need to switch to chrony. And I don't need to wait for ntpd to add this feature*. Go take a hike Bell!!!
*http://bugs.ntp.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1109 ... looks like never
Note, it could be just 1 rule, but I used 2 to make sure that I only SNAT packets originating from within the actual firewall/router itself, and not packets being forwarded from within the internal LAN (PC's). I can't figure out a way to specify "really originated locally" other than with mark, but I'm open to ideas. It's not as easy as it sounds with multiple interfaces on the box, unless there's a trick I'm missing.
If I wanted internal LAN PCs to also have their traffic go through, I'd need to use a -j MASQUERADE (it's a dynamic IP) in an extra rule and change the syntax slightly. Since all internal PCs should be set to use the firewall as ntp server, this shouldn't be a problem (in fact could help me id broken PC ntp setups). _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.ca https://muug.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable