[linsomniac]

It's easy to say that if you don't have experience from the receiving end...

For a very long time I ran publicly accessible NTP servers. Usually this required little to no maintenance, sometimes we'd get hammered (like when a large ISP rebooted all of their customers boxes at the same time). But usually it wasn't a big deal.

Now, when you have hundreds of thousands of people using your services, it doesn't take many people who have decided you are going to fix their problem, as a percentage to get overwhelmed. Mostly users were great, but there were a few...

My company provided Linux support, and our support number included an option users could select that was prefaced with "If you are an existing customer and are having a service impacting emergency, press 1 to receive a call back from a technician within 15 minutes."

This system would allow them to leave a voicemail and then would log a bug in our tracking system and would start calling our senior on-call tech and their backup, 24 hours a day. It was either the second or third time in a week this happened, and I replied with a "You are not a customer, this is not a service impacting outage, and you are reporting our servers replying to your computer's requests for time service."

The level of vitriol I received in return convinced me it was time to stop offering NTP as a public service.

Most people will spend some time understanding what is going on before reaching out to someone they've never heard of before, expecting them to fix the problem. But if you have enough people using something you provide, you will run across people who have huge expectations of you and get pissed off if you don't fix their problem.

[pbhjpbhj]

>and our support number included an option users could select //

Did you charge callers. I wonder if "you will be billed £20 for this call [or $30 or whatever]; current customers will have this cost refunded" would be enough (even if you never charged) to put people off.

[haneefmubarak]

Not the parent, but that actually seems like a pretty solid idea. Is this actually something that can be done?

Alternatively, why not just require the customer to enter their 10+ digit account number to proceed further?

[linsomniac]

In our case, implementing a pay for call, or even an account number would have been fairly hard, as an 8 person company. MOST people respected it, and on top of it there were a few cases where people used it to our benefit.

So, it was definitely a judgment call about if we should add something requiring a special code for access, charging, etc... In this case, we had to make the judgment call about implementing something like this, or stopping public NTP service.

Part of the equation also included that pool.ntp.org was now available and fairly well populated, when we started offering NTP service it wasn't a thing.

[tremon]

It is what Microsoft does. Even with a support contract, you have to provide them with a credit card number before they will accept a support case. When Microsoft agrees you've found a genuine bug in their software, they won't charge you.