Everything I know about the YK-1000H NTP Server
Back in October I bought a GPS-based YK-1000H NTP server from an international seller on eBay1. I finally got around to hooking it up. Since I can find effectively no documentation online, this blog post documents everything I’ve learned (which is not much).
Networking
The unit does not use DHCP; it uses the static IP 192.168.0.100. If your DHCP server assigns addresses in this range, you’ll need to tell it to reserve 192.168.0.100 to avoid a potential conflict.
I assigned my YK-1000H a DNS name in Pi-hole, which handles DNS for my home network.
Configuration
As far as I can tell, there is none. This AliExpress listing (archive.org link) for the YK-1000H mentions some sort of software which may be able to perform some sort of customization, but I don’t have that software and I could find no way of configuring anything.
Notably, this means that the display on the front of the YK-1000H is stuck displaying Beijing time, and it’s impossible to change the static IP address.
Open Ports
The only open port I’ve found is UDP port 123, used for NTP. No other ports appear to be open (notably, no TCP ports appear to be open, ruling out a web-based configuration UI).
NTP
NTP does work! You can test this with the ntpdate command:
ntpdate -q 192.168.0.100
The -q flag tells ntpdate not to set the system clock.
Monitoring
The YK-1000H does not reply to ICMP pings, meaning you can’t use a simple ping monitor from e.g. Uptime Kuma to check that it’s up. To monitor my unit, I created an Uptime Kuma push monitor, and my home NAS tests the NTP server every minute with ntpdate as described above:
* * * * * runner -job-name "healthcheck-home-ntp-server" -timeout 30 -success-notify "http://curie.lan:9001/api/push/ABCDEFabcdef?status=up&msg=OK&ping=" -- /usr/sbin/ntpdate -q 192.168.0.100 >/dev/null
Notably, this cron job uses my runner program to apply a timeout, update Uptime Kuma when the check succeeds, and provide nicer email output if the check fails.
I bought it from this listing (archive.org link). The same thing is available from many different sellers on eBay, AliExpress, etc. ↩