I received a tip on Twitter from @Lenzflair_Jack to look at pfSense ( https://www.pfsense.org/ ). It may not be appropriate for my hardware, and more specifically, I couldn’t determine if it would actually install on the Orbi.

In the mean time I opened up the Orbi admin web page and edited the NTP section:

It was configured to automatically update to DST, so I turned that off. I set the time to GMT. And while I was in there I pointed at a more trustworthy NTP server at time-a-g.nist.gov. It was initially pointed at Netgear. Why would I want a more trustworthy NTP server? Because there is at least one proof-of-concept where an ‘evil’ NTP server can perform a denial-of-service attack with a malformed NTP response. Basically it’s an issue of trust, and right now I don’t trust Netgear.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done something similar. When I first set up the Orbi I changed my primary DNS server to Google at 8.8.8.8, and my secondary to Cloudflare at 1.1.1.1. I’ve never had any issues with either over the last few decades, and I don’t expect I will in spite of how people like to harp about the evil of Google.

For those of you looking for a trustworthy NTP server, you can check here at https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi . I’m sure there are plenty of others out there, but I refuse to use any service from the vendor of Orbi at this point in time.

Now I get to wait and see if there are any more home network outages.