Show HN: Rkik – A light, efficient NTP diagnosis tool written in Rust (v1.10)

2 points

9 months ago

I’ve released rkik v1.10, a lean Rust tool to inspect NTP servers, compare offsets/RTTs, and optionally perform a one-shot system clock sync on Unix.

Repo: https://github.com/aguacero7/rkik

For those who dont know what it does: - Probe a single NTP server or compare multiple in one shot - Text / Simple / JSON outputs for humans or scripts - Fractional timing controls: sub-second --interval and --timeout (e.g., 0.1, 0.25) - Optional one-shot sync to “server UTC + half RTT” (Unix only) - Dry-run mode to validate the sync workflow without touching the clock

What’s new in v1.10

Clippy integrated in CI with lints as errors (consistent quality) - Sync module public API cleaned up (no more rkik::sync::sync double path) - Sync feature enabled by default in builds/packages - "--interval" and "--timeout" now accept fractional seconds - "--dry-run" for sync to verify flows in CI/scripts

Usage

Installing it is very simple using cargo: cargoo install rkik

Single server probe: rkik time.google.com

Compare multiple servers (10 requests, 200 ms apart), simple text: rkik -C time.google.com time.cloudflare.com --count 10 --interval 0.2 --short

JSON output (pretty-printed): rkik pool.ntp.org -jp

One-shot sync (Unix; needs root or CAP_SYS_TIME): rkik --server time.google.com --sync

Notes / caveats - Sync requires privileges (root or CAP_SYS_TIME). Dry-run works without them. - If a time daemon (chronyd/systemd-timesyncd) is active, it may readjust your clock afterward; that’s expected.

Roadmap / feedback I’m aiming to make it a PTP / NTS protocols Diag tool, I want rkik to become a real Time servers monitoring and analysis toolbox. Suggestions on output ergonomics, useful stats for CI/observability, or packaging for your distro or even github contributions are very welcome.

Happy to answer questions and take feedback!