D-Link settles!

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All the fuss about D-Link’s usage of the Danish-based stratum 1 time server seems to have had one good result. Poul-Henning Kamp’s web page has the following announcement this morning:

“D-Link and Poul-Henning Kamp announced today that they have amicably resolved their dispute regarding access to Mr. Kamp’s GPS.Dix.dk NTP Time Server site. D-Link’s existing products will have authorized access to Mr. Kamp’s server, but all new D-Link products will not use the GPS.Dix.dk NTP time server. D-Link is dedicated to remaining a good corporate and network citizen.”

which was nice.

Time will tell if D-Link has arranged their firmware to avoid sending undesirable traffic to other stratum 1 time servers as well, but at least the future well-being of Poul-Henning’s machine is assured.

Comments

5 responses to “D-Link settles!”

2006-04-27

Joseph A Nagy Jr

Who said a threatened boycott wouldn’t work? Good job folks (:

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2006-04-28

Ameliorations » Boys and Girls in Toyland

[…] Many of you probably remember an earlier post I made about D-Link’s rather rude and offensive behavior. Light Blue Touchpaper brings an update which begs the question to those who doubted the effectiveness of boycotts and letter writing campaigns, how can you now doubt whether or not even the threat of a boycott and a letter writing campaign works today? For this day D-Link has agreed to correct its behavior and the victim in this matter has made current D-Link routers that exhibit this behavior authorized users. Of course as people upgrade the firmware or change hardware, this will most likely no longer be a problem. Its good to see everyone comes out happy in this situation. […]

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2006-04-28

Anonymous Coward

This is great news! It’s a little short on details, though. Does this mean D-Link has agreed to pay Poul-Henning Kamp’s costs (i.e. bandwidth)?

Reply
2006-04-30

Joseph Bruno

Remember that corporations are slow to think and unlike individuals they can’t turn on a sixpence. They might have been going to Do The Right Thing anyway eventually.

But letter-writing campaigns do work. A couple of years ago a not-for-profit site I run was badly hit by the withdrawal of a free service from a big corporation. I organised a campaign with the following rules:

1. The CEO of XXXX is A– B–. His postal address is… His fax number is… [NOTE: I did not give an email address because it’s too easy to get an intern to delete all junk emails, and I did not give a phone number because phone calls can be easily filtered and forgotten about].
2. XXXX are acting perfectly within their rights in withdrawing their free service. They are a commercial enterprise and their job is to make money. They have no duty to provide their services for free.
3. Write to the CEO telling him you understand this but also telling him how important [our site] is to you. If he can see his way to restoring the free service in our case then you will be very grateful.

A week later the CEO telephoned and said the free service had been restored; apologized for having cut it off in the first place; and said he’d learnt a lot about our users in the past week.

Two years on, the free service continues, but I’m not naming names in case there is a new CEO who wants to make himself a reputation for being tough.

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2006-05-07

jasee

I’ve set up a few of these routers and there is often a selection of time servers which you can use. The time servers themselves are fixed but you can usually select which one to use. The purpose is to set dates in the log. Usually this is set to somewhere in 199*!. So it’s a useful function, otherwise you really have no idea when ‘something’ happened. It hadn’t occured to me that these might be making frequent requests to one or more servers! I will in future set them off once the time has been set. Perhaps the dlink or netgear routers don’t/didn’t have a manual option.

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